Recommending an Email Subscription Plugin.
 

I recently installed a plugin called Email Subscription by the Swedish developer, Tobias Nyholm.

When it did not do precisely what I needed it to do, I emailed him and he astonished me by improving the plugin on the spot.

You can now include the body of the blog (in this case public works notifications of road closures and water main breaks etc.), you can remove subscribers. The blog arrives at the email destination in a timely manner.

Here is the code in ATO/Settings/Email Subscriptions
***********************************
There is a new post at %site_url%.
You can go to the web site here: %post_url%

This is what the notification says:
%post_excerpt%

Any uploaded media or images will not show up in this email.

To unsubscribe from future mail, follow this link: %unsubscribe_url%
************************************
Further, I wanted more than 55 words to be in the content of the notification. I decided on 500 words. You can configure excerpts in ATO but that did not work for me. Instead he gave me this code to put in the bottom of themes functions.php:

//expand size of excerpt

function custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {
return 500;
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'custom_excerpt_length', 999 );

We have all suffered the frustration of asking a developer a question about his plugin, only to wait for weeks or months for a reply, if ever. I like to reward responsive developers and I hope you do, too. Consider the donate button if you like it!