Updated 2/5/20: Mailpoet has finally decided to update their Mailpoet 2 plugin for PHP 7.3 Compatibility. Thus, the contents of this page no longer apply. However, you might enjoy this post:
Mailpoet + Amazon SES: Cheapest Email Marketing Solution for WordPress
While my primary blogging efforts are typically focused on personality psychology, I have been a long-time user and fan of the Mailpoet 2 newsletter plugin for WordPress. Our blog has well over 50,000 subscribers and Mailpoet 2 combined with Amazon SES has proven a remarkably effective and affordable means of doing our email marketing.
We were therefore disappointed to hear that, as of 2019, Mailpoet 2 would no longer be updated. It appears that the plugin authors are now focusing primarily on Mailpoet 3 and encouraging people, both directly and indirectly, to use their sending service rather than third-party SMTP services such as Amazon SES.
In our view, the Mailpoet 3 sending service is priced too high for larger lists like ours. And while Mailpoet 3 technically works with SMTP without using their sending service, they’ve stripped away a number of key features, most notably user open and click rates (necessary for effective list pruning / management), which render this option rather worthless.
So at this point, we’ve decided to stick with Mailpoet 2, at least for the time being (we may eventually switch to Send in Blue).
The only major issue we’ve encountered with Mailpoet 2 is a failure of the newsletter editor to load properly when composing or editing an email. While some users have attributed this to an incompatibility with newer versions of WordPress (e.g., 5.2), it is actually a fatal error / incompatibility with PHP 7.3, as described here. Thus, if you have a newer version of WordPress, you may have received an email from WordPress detailing the following error:
Since the Mailpoet team has no intention to fix this issue (again, wanting people to switch to their Mailpoet 3 sending service), those who wish to continue using Mailpoet 2 will need to find a way to make things work. There are two basic options for doing so:
- Downgrade your site’s PHP to 7.2 or lower.
- Modify the Mailpoet plugin so that it works with the most recent version of PHP.
Fixing the Mailpoet 2 Editor for PHP 7.3 Compatibility
Considering that older versions of PHP are slower, less secure, and will soon be incompatible with WordPress, we decided to hire a WordPress developer to modify the Mailpoet plugin in order to make it PHP 7.3 compatible. We are excited to report he did an excellent job and the editor now works perfectly, just as it did before:
Modifying plugins is rarely as easy as it might sound, especially for developers who didn’t author the plugin. It can take a lot of time and resources to do it the right way. Thus, to recoup some of our costs, we decided to charge a nominal fee for those who wish to access the modified plugin file. If you have any questions regarding the nature of the fix, please feel free to contact us. Here’s what it includes:
