FluentSTMP & MAINWP

I wrote a few MainWP extensions, and the last one I said I would write about 7 months ago was one for FluentSMTP. My other open source projects got busy, and I ran out of time; a few weeks ago I started working on this project.

I am pleased to say that I have finally got to the point where I need others to test it for several reasons.

My MainWP dashboard blocks connections on SMTP ports, and FluentSMTP doesn’t support the Emailit API, which is what I use; this means when testing, I can not keep it active for long periods of time. I wrote an integration for Emailit this weekend and have submitted it as a PR and hopefully the team can add that https://github.com/WPManageNinja/fluent-smtp/pull/411

For the reason above, I am not currently using FluentSMTP, and this means my testing is limited to a handful of test sites. There is no real data or real usage; it's all simulated, and I think I am at the limits of this sort of testing.

I have chosen to do this differently from my other MainWP extensions because FluentSMTP is a true open source plugin, and this has changed how I have developed this, and I will go into more details below

So Naturally i feel I am at the limit of what I can test with this, and I can’t possibly release this without some form of real-world testing it wouldn’t be fair to the communities of Fluent and MainWP.

So without further ado, the following video shows you the extension in action and what it can do, etc

https://youtu.be/GfrUr7gLYL0

This is different than any of my other releases

If you're still interested, I need to talk about the philosophy here; my other extensions have all been standalone, requiring a different client and dashboard plugin because they have been for plugins which are not truely open source I can’t contribute the needed code to the code base and this means I’ve had to do this, I recently designed a universal dashboard/child plugin for my flowmattic patcher integration - https://youtu.be/x6pZcernr9U and this works well.

So with this one, I have built it to be bundled within the FluentSMTP plugin,

A bit like this

FluentSMTP

│

├── Existing plugin

│   ├── Mailers

│   ├── Logging

│   ├── Settings

│   ├── Notifications

│   └── API

│

└── MainWP Extension

    ├── Loader

    ├── Dashboard

    ├── Child

    ├── CSS

    └── JavaScript

It is designed with a single included requirement being added to the core plugin and a single include to add it

In fluent-smtp.php, I add a single line of code:

require_once plugin_dir_path(FILE) . 'includes/mainwp/mainwp-loader.php';

Thats it - Why? My intentions for this code is to submit it as a PR once written and hopefully get it adopted into the main build. This means if you have Fluentsmtp installed on your dashboard and child site, you will have MainWP access.

I have designed it to be as unobtrusive as possible and as easy to update until we get there as possible.

So how will this work?

I am looking for a few people to test it out, initially you can show your interest here https://beta.techarticles.co.uk/fluentsmtp/ and I will be in contact when I work this out the next steps there will be a follow up survey once on the list to find out a little bit more about you as individuals, how many sites, what your stacks are, if you’ve ever given feedback before etc, from here I will select a few priority will be given to larger sites, developers of other plugins and the teams of MainWP and FluentSMTP

I am not looking to add new features; the community can do that once its PR is accepted. What I need to know is if this Minimal viable product version is enough and works well enough to be useful.

Why not just release to everyone at the same time?
I usually do this and get so little feedback it just doesn’t work; I need people who will actively test and will provide feedback. This is important, as per my intentions above, that this doesn’t cause issues I haven’t found in testing. This will likely be the biggest extension for MainWP I’ve built I know hundreds of people use my client note extension for MainWP, but FluentSMTP has over 600k users. I want to get this right.

Once you're in the beta.

You will get access to a modified version of FluentSMTP as above, with the MainWP drop-in available; these will be labelled the same as the current version with a -test suffix.

I.e 2.2.95-test-1: you need to install this on your dashboard and sites to get it to work.

I strongly recommend you test in a staging environment first; this is BETA

Thanks for reading, and all feedback is welcome