One way to increase the utility of your group’s WordPress site is to set it up so that new postings are sent to your group’s mailing list. This means that content can be posted once and be distributed automatically, reducing effort and making it more likely that important information is posted to the public website where it can be found.

There are a number of plugins available that can do this for you, and generally speaking a plugin will give you more control over the formatting of the content that is sent. You can also ‘subscribe’ your mailing list to your wordpress site without installing any additional plugins, in which case a short text only announcement of the post will be sent to your mailing list, with a link to click to read the full post. Instructions for doing so are below. Thanks to Mathghamhain Ua Ruadháin for researching this.

• Sign in to your WordPress Admin interface
• Create a new user named something like “Populace Mailing List” with the role of “subscriber”. Set the email address of the new account to be the address of the mailing list.
• From then on every time a new post is made it will be announced to the mailing list.

Please note that this only applies to new postings, and not new pages. This is one of the ways posts and pages differ in WordPress.

Should you wish to have more control over the announcement, to control the layout or to include the full posting, you’ll need to use a plugin such as Better Notifications for WP, Notification, or MailPoet. Kingdom Webministers may not be familiar with all of the plugin options, and may not be able to support your use of them. Additionally, some plugins may have restricted functionality in their free tiers, and may not offer all the options you want unless you moved to a paid tier.

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P.S., as a bonus tip, you might also want to guide individuals to creating subscriber accounts on your WordPress site if they’d like to receive these notifications directly to their email address.