Where Did My Brain Go?

Quick Mail 4.1.5 WordPress Plugin

I created the Quick Mail WordPress plugin in 2014, to send an unpublished post draft from the WordPress Dashboard to my daughter, the proofreader.

Quick Mail 4.1.5 is the fiftieth release on Github.

I added many features to Quick Mail over those 50 releases. For example, I learned Punycode in 2016 to translate international email addresses.

My favorite feature is the WP-CLI command, added in 2017. Quick Mail can send emails with attachments from a terminal command line with WP-CLI.

Email Beyond WordPress

Quick Mail 4.1.5 can send emails with attachments to members of your blog, or anyone. You can also hide administrators, for safety and privacy.

Additionally, Quick Mail recognizes plugins from Sendgrid, Mailgun, Sparkpost delivery services, to send reliable email from WordPress.

Finally, this sounds daunting, but Quick Mail includes lots of help. Just click “Help.”

Welcome to Quick Mail 4.1.5

So, after 49 releases, what could possibly go wrong?

I could not separate a list of banned domains, with commas.

Revisiting Banned Domains

WordPress administrators should be able to control their users. For example, an author should not be able to send emails to a business competitor from a company Website.

Therefore, I added banned domains to Quick Mail 4.0.5 for administrators.

Obviously, I wanted to validate user input, before updating the option setting. But I used the sanitize_text function for safety.

sanitize_text removes commas, punctuation.

However, new users might separate domains with spaces or commas. Nobody knows. So Quick Mail 4.1.5 recognizes both delimiters.

With this in mind, I replace commas with spaces, before using sanitize_text to remove other stuff.

Download Quick Mail 4.1.5

I removed Quick Mail from the WordPress plugin repository.

But you can download Quick Mail 4.1.5 from Github.

Comment: Quick Mail and WordPress Roadmap

Quick Mail does not use the Gutenberg editor or REST API. However, you might wonder if Quick Mail will be affected by the upcoming WordPress Roadmap and Full Site Editing.

I think this plan will change. WordPress 5.8 was a disaster, because it broke everyone’s widgets.

Well, not my widgets, because I read the WordPress Field Guide before this, and every release.

Also – it might take me six months to learn enough React to create a block widget. Then – ten hours of programming to match what I can do in an hour with PHP, jQuery, decade of WordPress experience.

It sounds awful, but I would learn React and blocks – if they improved page speed or search rank.

But there is no benefit and no visible difference between classic and block widgets.

WordPress 5.9

WordPress 5.9 will be worse. “Block navigation flows” might break your menus.

Finally, WordPress 5.9 wants to change the way authors write themes. How will that affect the thousands of themes that developers sell to support their families?

I think the unwelcome push to Gutenberg is sparking a new interest in WordPress page builders, like Elementor and Divi.

Because I meet many people with WordPress sites. But I have only met one person who liked Gutenberg. Something will change.