This week’s release notes cover a variety of small improvements to our plugins and theme. 

Now supporting funky button styles in Newsletters

Newspack Newsletters now supports a number of button block styles, specially the button’s background color, text color, width, padding, and border radius.

These style controls were always visible in the editor, but they weren’t always supported by the code generated for the actual newsletters that were sent out.

Updating the WooCommerce ‘Thank You’ template

Periodically, the template files in the WooCommerce plugin are changed. If a theme or plugin includes its own copy of that template to customize it, a warning will be displayed on the site’s WordPress Dashboard until that template is also updated. One of these warning started displaying for the Newspack Theme’s Thank You template after the WooCommerce 8.1.0 release:

While these warnings don’t mean there’s necessarily an issue, it’s important that they’re investigated, just in case! We’ve reviewed the theme’s Thank You template, made some tweaks, and updated its version number so this warning should stop displaying.

Spotlighting our recommended Ads.txt and GDPR plugins, and help prevent spam

The Newspack Plugin helps manage our required, recommended, and supported plugins, and includes a Health Check to make it easier to see what plugins aren’t supported when troubleshooting issues. 

This release adds Ads.txt Manager and Complianz – GDPR/CCPA Cookie Consent to our recommended plugins list, so they both appear nested under Newspack on the Plugins screen. There are a lot of plugins to choose from to manage your ads.text file, or display a cookie consent banner for GDPR compliance. Ads.txt Manager and Complianz are our top picks for these two jobs. If needed, they can be installed and enabled right from the WP Admin > Plugins list.  

Akismet Anti-Spam: Spam Protection has been added to our list of required plugins, which means it’s activated automatically, and cannot be deleted from Newspack sites using the WP Admin > Plugin screen. Akismet helps prevent comment and form spam, which is really important, so this helps make sure it’s doing that job on all sites. 

Lastly, the official AMP plugin has been removed from our supported list as part of our moving away from AMP. This means it will appear on the WP Admin > Newspack > Health Check screen if it’s installed and activated on a site, as it may cause issues with how a site operates.

Improving network code error handling in Newspack Ads

Newspack Ads has been updated to prevent invalid network codes from getting “stuck” and throwing an error. This would happen when the account connected to Google Ad Manager was updated; rather than the update properly saving, the plugin’s dashboard would start displaying the error, “The network code is invalid.”

Now when the connected user account is updated, Newspack Ads will double-check that the network code it has stored is correct, and if not, it will update it to the network code associated with the new account automatically.

Next release cycle

Our next release is scheduled for the week of October 9. Until next time,

– The Newspack Product team