It’s more difficult to keep this in mind, than it is to actually execute it. Sometimes we (content creators) want to publish content to see how it feeds to our Twitter or Facebook accounts, or to see how it turns up in the RSS feed, so what we usually do is publish a “test” post and delete it afterwards (together with the tweet and Facebook post.)
However, sent e-mails cannot be deleted, once they’re out there, there’s no turning back. It’s not the best user experience to receive a “testing my twitter plugin” e-mail, right? Jetpack is one of the best ways to deliver e-mail notifications, about your new posts, to your subscribers. I wrote about it before and actually use it myself.
The best way to prevent all of this is of course to use dummy accounts or staging servers. The second best way to test your posts publishing out, is to wait for actual content (and if things didn’t work, try again next time), but sometimes we want to just try it out in our live environment, and if you do that, don’t forget to disable Jetpack subscriptions, which can be done in two easy steps. In the Jetpack configuration page under Subscriptions, hit Learn More and you’ll see a Deactivate button.
Don’t worry, you will not loose all your subscribers, they’ll start receiving notification e-mails, when you Activate the subscriptions module again on that very same page, and yeah, don’t forget to activate it back when you’re done “testing things out.”
That’s about it! How do you handle test posts you don’t want your subscribers to see? Can you easily deactivate the e-mails with other plugins and services such as Feedburner? Share your thoughts and comments and thank you for subscribing!
Great post, you can further tap into the behavior by altering the
transition_post_statushook; like maybe have a checkbox[x] send subscriptions.Yeah that too, though if 99% of the time you want to send subscriptions, then a checkbox would be too much, unless it can be hidden under Screen Options. Thanks for your comment!