Here are some old answers that didn't make the migration to the new UUA.org in August 2020.

Jim Gasperini replied:

Hello, Janeen--
Thanks for asking some of the same questions I've been addressing.
Here are some questions I sent to a technical consultant earlier this week.
"What do you think of the arguments made here? http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/why-you-should-never-use-wordpress-to-... "I have been looking at a plugin called MailPoet. They recommend "using an SMTP provider," for reasons outlined here: https://support.mailpoet.com/knowledgebase/send-with-smtp-when-using-a-p...
What do you think of this argument? Any thoughts about MailPoet?"
I have yet to hear back. I will share any information that seems useful.

Anonymous wrote:

There's the question of what technology to use, but before that should come a discussion of policy.
There is some discussion of policy issues here: http://www.uuism.net/uuwiki/index.php?title=Webmaster_policy
When one of our Web team saw the example of a newsletter sign up form in the UUA Theme demo website, she was aghast. She believed that doing that went against what the UUA recommends. We, in our congregation, certainly would not have a newsletter sign up in the public part of our web site, with all the world possibly signing up for it, and no controls.
FWIW, our congregation uses Constant Contact (http://www.constantcontact.com/) for our newsletter, although we have looked into using MailChimp (http://mailchimp.com/). MailChimp is free up to a certain number of mails sent, but we are reasonably happy with Constant Contact and will probably stick with it because we're pretty used to it (and its foibles). Both of those products take responsibility for using a reliable mail delivery service, independent of your own web site's email delivery. We had some issues with our own web site's email delivery (in particular, its being very prone to blocking). When we moved our email delivery to using Google's (an option our hosting provider offered) things went much more smoothly.
So, for a number of reasons, I would suggest you look into how you want your newsletter(s) to operate, and how you wish the sign-ups to work. It may be that you would be better served using something like MailChimp, and a separate sign-up approach (perhaps on your web site, behind a members login) than using a WordPress plugin.
I hope these thoughts are helpful...

Anonymous wrote:

I just read the content at http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/why-you-should-never-use-wordpress-to-... and completely agree with it.

Anonymous wrote:

Janeen - Bryan's absolutely right that the first thing to do is to figure out what service you want to use. The UUA has a discounted program with Emma, I generally recommend MailChimp, lots of people like Constant Contact - they all have their pluses and minuses. Pretty well every service has a WordPress plugin that will make it easy for you to autoshare your posts to the mailing list software, and a widget to allow easy signup. I would tend to stay away from services like MailPoet that have high levels of WordPress integration/dependency for a few reasons, some of which were noted in Jim's linked article.Bryan - I don't know why your web team member would be aghast. It is commonly recommended that newsletter forms on congregation sites be public so that people can sign up for them and get information about the congregation even before attending. I assume that your person's concern is going to be about privacy, but when most of our congregations add someone to their newsletter mailing list the first time they walk in the door, this notion of an online signup being more risky doesn't hold much water.I'm going to close this though because it's off topic to the support of the UUA Theme. This space isn't an open conversation on everything to do with UUA congregation websites. For that I would recommend asking on the Websters email list or in the UU Website Lab Facebook group where you'll get a more fulsome discussion and response.

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