We recently released an important update to both the web application and the WordPress plugin. If you have the News@me WordPress plugin installed and you plan to upgrade to this release, you’ll be surely interested in reading this carefully.
Uppercase and lowercase topics
The first change we introduced in this new WordPress plugin and in the corresponding API endpoints is the possibility to send uppercase topics to News@me.
Previous versions were forcing topics to be saved as downcase. This limitation is now removed and you are free to send upperacse topics too. This means that “Sport” will be seen as different from “sport”. Readers subscribed to the one in lowercase will not receive articles marked with the other one using Uppercase.
Many of you requested this feature. This change allows you to set acronyms and product names as topics of your posts correctly spelt for a clearer understanding to the readers.
Uppercase, lowercase and automatic copy of tags and categories
Previous version of the plugin had active by default the automatic copy of tags or categories into News@me topics.
This feature is still active by default, but a special care is required by you to avoid that topics which were previously copied from tags and forced to lowercase will now be sent in uppercase. The risk is to have topics duplicated in the database, and readers previously subscribed to “sport” won’t be receiving articles marked as “Sport”.
To solve this issue you can use the newly released topic rename feature described later in this article.
Topics saved in WordPress database
Previous versions of the plugin used to show a local copy of News@me topics in the metabox. This feature was required to send topics to the widget read the topics and assign them to each subscription using a copy of the topics stored in your WordPress database.
This behaviour has now changed. For published posts, you’ll now see the latest and up-to-date topics taken straight from your News@me app. A local backup copy will still be used in case of “Draft” or “Pending Review”.
Rename of a topic
The biggest news is the possibility to rename topics. In “Database > Topics” you’ll now find a search field and also an “Edit” link shown under each topic.
The editing page allows you to proceed with the rename of the topic. It’s important to note that a rename action cannot be undone therefore carefully perform this action.
Once the new name is typed in, you’ll be able to perform a check on this new name. If a topic with the same name already exists, subscriptions and articles will be merged and an email will be sent to you once the renaming has been rolled out to all your subscribers.
If a name instead has not been used before, you’ll be renaming the current topic with your new name.
Please note that this rename action only affects topics which are submitted to the News@me database.
New setting for automatic topics assignment
It’s now possible to disable the default behavior of News@me which assigns topics from your tags or categories. You’ll find a specific option for this in the “Preferences” section. By disabling this preference, News@me will work only on those posts which topics have been added to.
New setting to disable News@me
It’s also possible to disable News@me on a specific article using a new checkbox introduced in the News@me metabox. When this checkbox is checked, the widget will be hidden from that post. Topics which were added to the article will be saved in your local WordPress database copy and restored once the News@me widget is enabled back.
Under the hood this feature deletes the article from News@me, so disabled articles will never appear in email digests.