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Rewriting in Style: Writers and editors might review this 1960 F.L. Lucas essay, On the Fascination of Style, brought to my attention by Stan Carey. Much is still relevant, particularly these principles:

First, honesty. In literature, as in life, one of the fundamentals is to find, and be, one’s true self. …. In writing, in the long run, pretense does not work. …. If handwriting reveals character, writing reveals it still more. You cannot fool all your judges all the time.Secondly, courtesy — respect for the reader. From this follow several other basic principles of style. Clarity is one. For it is boorish to make your reader rack his brains to understand. One should aim at being impossible to misunderstand — though men’s capacity for misunderstanding approaches infinity.Brevity is another basic principle. For it is boorish, also, to waste your reader’s time. …. [B]revity is often more effective; the half can say more than the whole, and to imply things may strike far deeper than to state them at length.

This week, Carnegie Mellon will have me back to talk to students in the program I graduated from, one founded after the Plain Language Movement in the early ’70s. It was there, in a course called “Style,” that we learned to practice (and practice) clarity, brevity, and respect for readers. And that much of writing is really rewriting.

from google
october 2011

copy to mine

Create Perfect Emails For Your WordPress Website

Whatever type of website you operate, its success will probably hinge on your interaction with your audience. If executed well, one of the most effective tools can be a simple email.

WordPress users are in luck, since WordPress already has easy-to-use and extendable functions to give you a lot of power and flexibility in handling your website’s emails.

In order to create our own system, we will be doing four things. First, we will create a nice email template to use. We will then modify the mailer function so that it uses our new custom template. We will then modify the actual text of some of the built-in emails. Then we will proceed to hook our own emails into different events in order to send some custom emails. Let’s get started!

How WordPress Sends Emails
WordPress has a handy function built in called wp_mail(), which handles the nitty-gritty of email sending. It is able to handle almost anything you throw at it, from custom HTML emails to modifications to the “From” field.

WordPress itself uses this function, and you can, too, by using WordPress hooks. You can read all about how hooks work in WordPress, but here is the nutshell version, and we will be working with them in this article so much that you’ll learn it by the end.

Hooks enable you to add your own functions to WordPress without modifying core files. Without hooks, if you wanted to send a publication notice to the author of a post, you would have to find the function that published the post and add your own code directly to it. With hooks, you write the function for sending the email, and then hook it into the function that publishes the post. Basically, you are telling WordPress to run your custom function whenever the function for publishing posts runs.

Setting Up Shop
The first thing we’ll have to do is create a plugin. We could get away without it and just use our theme’s functions file, but this would become clunky in the long run. Don’t worry: setting up a plugin is super-easy.

Go to your website’s plugins folder, which can be found under wp-content. Create a new folder named my_awesome_email_plugin. If you want a different name, use something unique, not email or email_plugin; otherwise, conflicts might arise with other plugins.

Create a file named my_awesome_email_plugin.php in the new folder. The name of the file (without the extension) must be the same as the name of the folder.

Edit the contents of my_awesome_email_plugin.php by copying and pasting the code below and modifying it where necessary. This is just some default information that WordPress uses to show the plugin in the plugins menu in the admin area.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: My Awesome Email Plugin
Plugin URI: http://myawesomewebsite.com
Description: I created this plugin to rule the world via awesome WordPress email goodness
Version: 1.0
Author: Me
Author URI: http://myself.me
*/

?>

Once that’s done, save the file, go to the WordPress admin section, and activate your new plugin. If you’re new to this, then congratulations! You have just created your first working WordPress plugin! It doesn’t really do anything yet, but don’t let that bother you. Just read on, because we’ll be adding some functionality after the next section.

Creating An Email Template
Creating good email templates is worth an article on its own. I will just share the method that I use, which does not mean that doing it differently is not allowed. Feel free to experiment!

I am not a big fan of using images in emails, so we will be building an HTML template using only CSS. Our goal is to come up with a template to which we can add a header and footer section. We will send our emails in WordPress by pulling in the header, putting the email text under that and then pulling in the footer. This way, you can change the design of your emails very easily just by modifying the templates.

Without further ado, here’s the code for the email template that I made. Or you can download it as an HTML file (right-click, and then select “Save as”). If you want a quick preview of what it looks like, just click the link.

<html>
<head>

<title>The Subject of My Email</title>

</head>
<body>
<div id="email_container" style="background:#444">
<div style="width:570px; padding:0 0 0 20px; margin:50px auto 12px auto" id="email_header">
<span style="background:#585858; color:#fff; padding:12px;font-family:trebuchet ms; letter-spacing:1px;
-moz-border-radius-topleft:5px; -webkit-border-top-left-radius:5px;
border-top-left-radius:5px;moz-border-radius-topright:5px; -webkit-border-top-right-radius:5px;
border-top-right-radius:5px;">
MyAwesomeWebsite.com
</div>
</div>

<div style="width:550px; padding:0 20px 20px 20px; background:#fff; margin:0 auto; border:3px #000 solid;
moz-border-radius:5px; -webkit-border-radius:5px; border-radius:5px; color:#454545;line-height:1.5em; " id="email_content">

<h1 style="padding:5px 0 0 0; font-family:georgia;font-weight:500;font-size:24px;color:#000;border-bottom:1px solid #bbb">
The subject of this email
</h1>

<p>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing
elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa
<strong>strong</strong>. Cum sociis natoque penatibus
et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus
mus. Donec quam felis, ultricies nec, pellentesque
eu, pretium quis, sem. Nulla consequat massa quis
enim. Donec pede justo, fringilla vel, aliquet nec,
vulputate eget, arcu. In enim justo, rhoncus ut.
</p>
<p>
Imperdiet a, venenatis vitae, justo. Nullam dictum
felis eu pede <a style="color:#bd5426" href="#">link</a>
mollis pretium. Integer tincidunt. Cras dapibus.
Vivamus elementum semper nisi. Aenean vulputate
eleifend tellus. Aenean leo ligula, porttitor eu,
consequat vitae, eleifend ac, enim. Aliquam lorem ante,
dapibus in, viverra quis, feugiat a, tellus. Phasellus
viverra nulla ut metus varius laoreet. Quisque rutrum.
Aenean imperdiet. Etiam ultricies nisi vel augue.
Curabitur ullamcorper ultricies nisi.
</p>

<p style="">
Warm regards,<br>
The MyAwesomeWebsite Editor
</p>

<div style="text-align:center; border-top:1px solid #eee;padding:5px 0 0 0;" id="email_footer">
<small style="font-size:11px; color:#999; line-height:14px;">
You have received this email because you are a member of MyAwesomeSite.com.
If you would like to stop receiving emails from us, feel free to
<a href="" style="color:#666">unregister</a> from our mailing list
</small>
</div>

</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Remember that this is an email, so the HTML won’t be beautiful. The safest styling method is inline, so the fewer frills you can get away with, the better.

Let’s split this into two parts. The header part of the email is everything from the top right up to and including the h1 heading on row 23 (i.e. lines 01 to 23). Copy that bit and paste it into a new file in your my_email_plugin folder, and name it email_header.php. The footer part of the email is everything from the paragraph tag before “Warm regards” right until the end (i.e. lines 48 to 64). The text between the header and footer is just a placeholder so that you can see what the finished product will look like. We will fill it with whatever content we need to send at the time.

Preparing The WordPress System For Our Emails
By default, WordPress sends plain-text emails. In order to accommodate our fancy HTML email, we need to tell the wp_mail() function to use the HTML format. We will also set up a custom “From” name and “From” address in the process, so that the email looks good in everyone’s inbox. To accomplish this, we’ll be using the previously mentioned hooks. Let’s look at the code; explanation follows.

add_filter ("wp_mail_content_type", "my_awesome_mail_content_type");
function my_awesome_mail_content_type() {
return "text/html";
}

add_filter ("wp_mail_from", "my_awesome_mail_from");
function my_awesome_mail_from() {
return "hithere@myawesomesite.com";
}

add_filter ("wp_mail_from_name", "my_awesome_mail_from_name");
function my_awesome_email_from_name() {
return "MyAwesomeSite";
}

On line 01, we have defined that we are adding a filter to the WordPress function wp_mail_content_type(). Our filter will be called my_awesome_mail_content_type. A filter is nothing more than a function, so we need to create the function my_awesome_mail_content_type().

Remember that actions are functions called from within other functions? We add an action to the wp_insert_user() function, and the action is performed whenever wp_insert_user() runs. Filters are specified in much the same way; but, instead of running alongside the function that it is called from, it modifies the value of the entity that it is called on.

In our case, this means that somewhere inside the wp_mail() function is a variable that holds the email type, which is by default text/plain. The filter hook wp_mail_content_type is called on this variable, which means that all attached filters will be run. We happen to have attached a filter to it on line 01, so our function will perform its task. All we need to do is return the value text/html, which will modify the value of the variable in the wp_mail function to text/html.

The logic behind the rest of the code is exactly the same. Adding a filter to wp_mail_from enables us to change the sender’s address to hithere@myawesomewebsite.com, and adding a filter to wp_mail_from_name enables us to change the sender’s name.

Modifying Existing WordPress System Emails
Welcoming New Users

This is the content of the default WordPress email.

As mentioned, WordPress has a bunch of built-in emails that can be easily controlled (using hooks, of course). Let’s mod[…]

WordPress email plugins from google
october 2011

copy to mine