Genesis eNews Extended 2.1 Released

Genesis eNews Extended 2.1 is now available on WordPress.org. It has been a couple of years since a new version has been released—frankly, the plugin just works and it hasn’t needed much work.

Please note this version requires WordPress 4.9.6 and will not be offered unless you’re running WordPress 4.9.6+.﻿

The European Union is preparing to implement this week their new data protection law, GDPR, which impacts Genesis eNews Extended and WordPress. If you have WordPress 4.9.6, released last week, you can setup a privacy policy page which Genesis eNews Extended will provide a link to under the subscription form, if you choose.

The feature respects the WordPress setting for the privacy page, as well as the various hooks implemented as part of the new feature for both the text of the link and the link itself. If any themes or plugins filters these value, the widget will use the same values to help site administrators set once and forget.

On a related note, I’ve fielded a few questions about how to add a checkbox to the widget for GDPR compliance. From my best understanding, this is not required. A subscription form that is exclusively for an e-mail subscription does not require a checkbox to confirm the visitor intent, since the action they are doing is the one and the same. If a form exists for any other purpose, then there does need to be a checkbox to confirm the visitor intent to also subscribe to a list.

Because of this, I am not adding an option to add a subscription confirmation checkbox to Genesis eNews Extended. It is meant to be a very simple plugin exclusively for newsletter subscriptions and while site owners are free to use it for other purposes, I’m only building and supporting the intended use as a mailing list subscription form “wrapper” that allow Genesis theme styles to have an easy time theming a “standard” subscription form.

﻿Update: 2.1.1 was also released to fix a small issue with a bit of extra code displaying on the front end.