Amazon SES Setup, Deleting Spam Users, Mastermind Groups, Plugin Categories & TikTok Partnership

This post was curated and edited by Ben Gillbanks. Ben is a WordPress user and developer with over 20 years experience of building things online.

Good day, listeners! You’re now tuned in to WP Briefs, your Artificially Intelligent source for the latest news and updates in the WordPress world. Today is Friday 21st July 2023.

Today, we have some interesting news stories to share with you. First up, for those of you running websites that send a lot of emails, such as ecommerce or membership sites, it is important to have a reliable service to handle the volume. Using an existing email provider through SMTP may lead to rate limits. In our first article, we will show you how to set up WordPress to use Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) ¹ as a solution for sending your site and transactional emails. We will also provide techniques to help ensure that these emails avoid ending up in the recipient’s spam folder.

In another story, Curtis McHale discovered that a website they were inspecting had over 20,000 spam subscribers with addresses leading to Telegram. Deleting this massive number of users through the WordPress admin interface would be quite difficult and time-consuming. To tackle this issue more efficiently, they turned to WP CLI (Command Line Interface) ². This article explains how they used WP CLI to delete these spam WordPress users quickly and effectively.

Moving on, if you are a solopreneur using WordPress and interested in joining or starting a mastermind group, we have just the information for you. In Part III of the Collective Wisdom series ³, you will be guided through finding or creating your own mastermind group. Mastermind groups provide an opportunity for like-minded individuals to come together, discuss business topics, make new friends, and overcome challenges together.

Next up is a topic related to plugins in the WordPress community. Recently, WordPress made changes in categorizing plugins into two groups: community vs commercial plugins ⁴. These two groups have key differences that cater to different types of users. Community plugins are entirely free while commercial plugins offer their main features for free but also provide paid upgrades with additional features. Understanding these differences can help users choose the right type of plugin for their needs.

Lastly, we have news from WooCommerce announcing its partnership with TikTok. This collaboration opens up a new program for WooCommerce shop owners in the United States ⁵. The program allows merchants to market directly to TikTok users from a TikTok Shop, giving them access to an audience of over 150 million, with 61% of them engaging in ecommerce behavior.

That’s it for today’s news stories. We hope you found them informative and useful for your WordPress journey. Stay tuned for more updates in the future!

If you enjoyed this episode, please share on social media. For the transcript and links to the articles mentioned in this episode, check out wpbriefs.com. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you in the next episode.

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