Subscribe2 vs Feedburner for WordPress Users

Subscribe 2 vs Feedburner for WordPress Users
Subscribe 2 is a very popular wordpress plugin. Subscribe2 provides a comprehensive subscription management and email notification system for WordPress blogs that sends email notifications to a list of subscribers when you publish new content to your blog. However, should you use the plugin? Lets read what the plugin does for you.

Subscribe 2 vs Feedburner for WordPress Users

Subscribe 2 vs Feedburner for WordPress Users

Why you should not use Subscribe2?

  1. If you are using a shared hosting. Do not use it. Each time you create a post, subscribe2 will send email to everybody using lots of server ——
  2. If you have some smart people around trying to ruin your site (as I do), they will subscribe for your blog and receive emails, then report to your hosting as if you are SPAMMING. The hosting companies do not listen to you usually if you are on shared server.
  3. You do not know how great is your subscription working. How the subscribers react with new posts.

Why Swich to Feedburner?

  1. Feedburner is now a service owned by Google.
  2. Your headache for receiving “Do Not Spam” is gone.
  3. Your server is no longer sending subscription emails, which will make your host happy.
  4. Extremely useful subscription statistics – how many users, what item they click – everything is recorded in great manner.

My recommendation:

Use feedburner both for RSS and Email subscriptions. Do Not Use any of the “Subscription/Comment Reply Subscription” Plugin for WordPress if you are on a shared hosting.

Use the Great WordPress Hack to redirect wordpress RSS to Feedburner using .htaccess. Change the Red Line to your feedburner url.

# temp redirect wordpress content feeds to feedburner
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine on
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner    [NC]
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator [NC]
 RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ http://feeds2.feedburner.com/catswhocode [R=302,NC,L]
</IfModule>

Some WordPress Plugin to Show off your Feedburner Stats compatible with WP 2.7

1. Genki Feedburner SiteStats

  • insert the Feedburner SiteStats code into footer
  • will work even when you change theme

2. FeedBurner Feed Stats

FeedBurner Feed Stats is a plugin that allows you to view your FeedBurner feed stats from inside of the WordPress admin interface.
Stats for your feed can be viewed from the “Feed Stats” page in the “Dashboard” section of WordPress.
Currently, this plugin allows you to view the following types of statistics:

  • Subscribers
  • Hits
  • Reach (see the FAQ section for more information about this)
  • Item Clickthroughs (there’s currently a known bug in the Google FeedBurner Awareness API preventing it from working; this feature will work again once Google fixes the bug)
  • Item Views (the same bug that affects Item Clickthroughs affects this)

3. FD Feedburner Plugin

Redirects the main feed and optionally the comments feed to Feedburner.com. It does this seamlessly without the need to modify templates, setup new hidden feeds, modify .htaccess files, or asking users to migrate to a new feed. All existing feeds simply become Feedburner feeds seamlessly and transparently for all users. Just tell the plugin what your Feedburner feed URL is and you’re done.

4. FeedBurner Widget

FeedBurner Widget is very simple sidebar widget plugin to easy customize and display your FeedBurner subscribers stats button. To use it, you have to register by FeedBurner first, to add your feed and to activate the Feed Count service for it. All of the FeedBurner chicklet customization options are available to edit from the menu: WP-Admin: Appearance: Widgets.

More information of Subscribe2:
WordPress Plugin Description: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe2/

Email Notifications can be sent on a per-post basis or periodically in a Digest email. Additionally, certain categories can be excluded from inclusion in the notification and post can be excluded on an individual basis by setting a custom field of ‘s2mail’ to ‘no’. The format of the email can also be customised for per-post notifications, subscribe2 can generate emails for each of the following formats:

  • plaintext excerpt
  • plaintext full post
  • HTML full post

The plugin also handles subscription requests allowing users to publically subscribe by submitting their email address in an easy to use form or to register with your blog which enables greater flexibility over the email content for per-post notifications for the subscriber. Admins are given control over the presentation of the email notifications, can bulk manage subscriptions for users and manually send email notices to subscribers.Subscribe2 supports two classes of subscribers: the general public, and registered users of the blog. The general public may subscribe and unsubscribe. They will receive a limited email notification when new post is made or periodically (unless that post is assigned to one of the excluded categories you defined). The general public will receive a plaintext email with an excerpt of the post: either the excerpt you created when making the post, the portion of text before a tag (if present), or the first 55 words of the post.

Registered users of the blog can elect to receive email notifications for specific categories (unless Digest email are select, then it is an opt in or out decision). The Users->Subscription menu item will allow them to select the delivery format (plaintext or HTML), amount of message (excerpt or full post), and the categories to which they want to subscribe. You, the blog owner, have the option (Options->Subscribe2) to allow registered users to subscribe to your excluded categories or not.