Shift This support responds to customer feedback with apology and improved support

That’s worth a mention.

I was among the many critics of this plugin (after buying two copies). I managed to get it working but it still feels fairly fragile. It blew up this morning trying to export a list of addresses.

The worst thing was the support – or, to be blunt, lack of it.

I’m pleased to say, that seems to have improved recently.

So, having run my newsletter now for about 3 months, what’s my verdict on the Shift This newsletter plugin? Well, in its favour, for the price of a month’s subscription to something like GraphicMail, you get the ability to write and send a newsletter and capture email subscriptions all from your own blog.

The downside is that there’s only one (dull) newsletter template – based on the WP theme ‘Kubrick’. To create any other design requires you’re either confident enough to hack that template somewhat (like I did with the one pictured above) or design a new one from scratch.

Is the newsletter worth the money? Yes – so long as you understand that what you’re getting is pretty basic. There’s no email list cleaning, no ‘who-opened-what’ analysis here. It’s a basic newsletter with graphics and links. But for about the same price as 1 month’s subscription to the flashier email newsletter packages, remember.

I said in my first post about this plugin that I thought a Wordpress graphic newsletter plugin was one of the ‘Holy Grails’ of blogging. This plugin is more than half-way towards that. If the developer could make it easier to design a newsletter, add some kind of useful list maintenance and continue to handle support issues positively, it would be a winner.

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