Newsletter
The HRC Newsletter is currently written and organized by Sharon Kingsland. It is manually created and completely separate from the website, though volunteers typically upload the newsletter to the website and often create News posts from the newsletter sections.
At some point in the future, HRC may wish to switch to a more legally compliant and website-integrated newsletter. The below describes using the WordPress Newsletter plugin, but it must be installed and configured first.
This post describes the process for creating a newsletter using the WordPress Newsletter plugin. Full documentation for the Newsletter plugin can be found here.
The video below shows the process for creating a newsletter. Note that the WordPress Dashboard may appear slightly different from in the video, but the Newsletter options will still be in the sidebar. Look for its red envelope logo. The Configuration settings should already be entered, so you can skip straight to the Newsletter menu item and get started!
Theme
Right after choosing to write a new newsletter, you will be prompted to choose a theme. Please choose the Custom HRC theme. To modify the theme, see the documentation.
Writing the newsletter
There are two primary approaches to writing the newsletter. The first is to write everything you want in the body of the Newsletter itself. The second is to write a brief introduction to the newsletter and include the rest of the newsletter sections as blog post summaries.
For the second method, write a blog post for each section of your Newsletter and put it in the Newsletter category. Choose these blog posts and excerpts to be included from the new Newsletter page. Also include any other posts from the blog you wish to include.
You can stop at any point while writing the newsletter and come back to it again. Choose Save above the Message area to save your work.
Sending the Newsletter
Test the Newsletter before sending it by choosing Save and test above the Message area. If all goes well, choose Send above the Message area to send the newsletter to all subscribers.
The newsletter will begin sending in a few minutes. It will not be delivered to all users at exactly the same time. For a technical explanation of why, read about the way the Newsletter delivery engine works.
Tags
Certain “tags” can be included in the newsletter to automatically generate content like the date or a link to the newsletter on the web. Tags can only be entered when in the Message (textual) tab, not in the main Message tab of the new Newsletter creation page. Tags you would be interested in using are probably already included in the theme, so you will likely not have to use this.
For more, see the documentation.