I’m sorry to ask this again. I touched on the subject briefly elsewhere, but I should have made a separate post. I’ve been fretting for days about this, so I need to know to avoid sleepless nights.
My photography web site is pretty big and even more so since I combined it with my blog after moving to WP.org from WP.com. The blog has been going for over 5.5 years now and I had about 87 followers. Three more appeared after the move and whilst likes, comments and follower numbers don’t bother me much, I don’t really want to do this in a vacuum. The odd like or comment from my regular people can brighten my day. I’m retired now and have no friends or family. Photography and the web site are very important to me.
I can’t get my head around continuing with the blog without Jetpack. I understand why they won’t be supporting CP and I’m even clearer on why I won’t go back to WP. I think 88 people follow “within WP” whatever that means, and two (presumably without WP.com accounts) follow via e-mail (however, I can no longer see them from my dashboard, which is odd).
As I said, I’ve never been interested in amassing huge numbers of followers. I just want to keep those who have stuck with me over the years. I can’t see how it can be done without Jetpack though
We’re all having to make adjustments. Can’t really afford not to.
What i’d like to see happen with Jetpack is that all those plugins are ‘unbundled’ in separate forks for CP. I always thought it was a huge mistake to bundle all that stuff in one giant plugin: so much crap to be disabled…
Is that possible? I assumed that because there are currently no other alternatives for subscriptions, comments and likes that it was somehow… banned. I don’t use anything else in Jetpack, just those blogging bits.
You’re going to see a lot of plugins forked; they’re open-source just like WP, and operating under GPL. In some cases, the plugin developers themselves may fork them, but not so with Jetpack (or parts of Jetpack). Not sure of the specifics of separating the subscription functions from Jetpack, but theoretically, it’s possible.
You should be fine using Jetpack for a year or two(?)
So you had a .com version and moved it to .org. Did you migrate all your followers at that stage? Something like this method:
This means your followers should now be handled by the .org site. It looks like it’s possible to move this over to another subscription service like mailchimp. Have a look at this:
Forking Jetpack would be difficult. Most of the services rely on WordPress.com API. It handles a lot of the work.
For example, subscription and followers. Followers can follow blogs inside WordPress.com account using Reader app. It’s like a RSS reader really. Email subscribers subscribe to receive email notifications when you publish blog posts, emails are sent by WordPress.com. So both cases require WordPress.com.
It is possible to move email subscribers to email platform like MailChimp. Inside, you would need to setup RSS to Email automatic campaign to send email to subscribers when you publish posts. Or emails can be sent manually like a newsletter.
For other Jetpack features, there are plugins in WP repository that replicate functionality of Jetpack. For example, Widget Visibility Without Jetpack is one. There’s another one for Jetpack galleries.
It’ll be easier to unbundle features and create either plugins for those features or combine them into larger plugin. But it might be easier to build plugins from scratch, maybe reuse some code, than to fork Jetpack. There’s a lot of API code to remove.
It’s a good idea to have a drop-in replacement for email subscriptions. Our hosting customers might need it, so I might take a look at this in near future.
Followers I don’t know, since it requires Reader app in WordPress.com.
Yes - I moved my site from .com to .org and I no longer have any followers on the former. There is nothing left, just the account so Jetpack can keep me visible to my followers. The problem I have with MailChimp is that only three are e-mail based, the rest (I’m guessing) use the Reader app. I could go down this route, but I think the information in your link is suggesting I then disable Jetpack. I would then have three followers who get e-mailed about my posts, but would be unable to like or comment. I would be back in that vacuum again…
ALL Jetpack modules have an equivalent, and often better, substitute.
Now, it depends what do you mean by “followers”.
If you were using the “subscriptions” module for that purpose, and other that for comments in posts, the most important part of this module is the Widget allowing visitors to subscribe for new site posts and getting “followers”.
For doing the same, Feedburner still works great but nobody knows for how long.
Otherwise, Mailchimp offers also this feature called RSS-to-Email (free for up to 2000 subscribers).
And yes, if you are using the “subscription” module, you can retrieve all emails of current followers and move them (re-subscribe them) somewhere else.
Reference: Subscriptions
Thank you, but that isn’t going to work. It’s taken nearly 6 years to get 90 followers. 87 of those are from WP.com and I assume they see my new posts through the Reader. Only 3 are e-mail subscribers. I do have three options on my site for subscriptions - the checkbox under comments, the widget and I also use the Better Follow Button for Jetpack. My guess is that without something to replace how Jetpack links back to WP.com followers, 87 are going to disappear at some point
So 87 of your 90 followers have an account on WP.com and followed you from there, so you don’t even have an email address for them? Is that right?
Sorry, I’m not really up on all the ‘following’ business, or how wp.com works.
One option that occurs to me is to write a post discussing your WP->CP migration and ask them to re-sign up as a follower using their email address - you could embed a sign-up form for whatever service you choose.
But I wouldn’t get too stressed about it at this stage - with LTS on V1 you should have a few years to sort it out.
The WordPress.com Reader brings together all WordPress.com sites – those hosted at WordPress.com and those connected through Jetpack – in one central location.
The WordPress.com Reader is a feed aggregator. It brings every WordPress.com blog together in one easy-to-search place. For sites that you follow, it displays all posts in the order they were published, with the most recent content appearing at the top.
When you connect Jetpack, any WordPress.com user who follows your site will start to see your posts in their Reader. From there, they can visit the post on your site, or like, share, or comment directly from the Reader.
So Zooey, I take it that almost all your followers are users of wordpress.com.
Right! I had to check, but when you are on WP.com, every site has a follow button. You only have to click on that and you are following that site and new posts appear in your reader. It’s taken me a while to figure it out because we really do have a zoo and although I’ve followed everyone who has followed me, I don’t have time to use the reader. (I wouldn’t even know where to find it).
Yes - I will write a post, but my guess is most won’t bother. If that’s the way things go, then so be it. I’m about to start un-Jetpacking my site as much as possible because I’m sure that won’t be compatible in the long run. If I can get people to sign up, then I’ll move their e-mail addresses to MailChimp.
Yes - I have just three e-mail subscribers. A handful will sign up from WP.com. Those are the ones to like and comment so I won’t be blogging entirely to myself. I’ll just pick up the pieces and start again
