This week’s releases includes a cosmetic update to our popular Donate block. The new Modern block style is a preview of Newspack’s new design standards, which will inform the look and feel of new reader-facing features going forward.

For the Donate block, the new style is purely cosmetic. If you like the look, please consider updating your site’s Donate blocks. You’ll find the new style in the block’s Styles sidebar panel. We highly recommend using the new Modern style wherever possible, as it will integrate better visually with future Newspack features.

See: newspack-blocks/1734

Newspack Ads: Deprecating AMP ad support

This is a BREAKING CHANGE, so please take note.

It’s been roughly a year since we officially deprecated built-in AMP support across the Newspack platform, and since then we’ve slowly been removing a lot of the code that handled AMP across our plugins and themes. This latest release of Newspack Ads removes built-in support for render ad units as amp-ad elements. This won’t affect hosted Newspack publishers, as we removed AMP from all hosted sites in April 2023.

See: newspack-ads/837

Also Newspack Ads: Adding 1×1 to all sizemaps

This release also adds support for 1×1 ad unit sizing for all ad units served by the Newspack Ads plugin. This should allow for more flexible ad creatives of unconventional sizing.

See: newspack-ads/837

Save sender and recipient info in newsletter layouts

Custom layouts created in the Newsletters plugin will now save the sender name and email address as well as the recipient info with the layout. This should help streamline newsletter workflows, as well as reduce the risk of sending out newsletters to the wrong list.

Note that this will only affect layouts when saved going forward—if you’d like to save the sender and recipient info with an existing layout, you’ll need to edit the layout to include the desired sender/recipient info.

See: newspack-newsletters/1461

Custom role for assignable authors who don’t edit posts

We’ve heard feedback from several publishers that not all content authors should be able to edit content in WP admin—for example, the author might be an ex-staff member. We’ve introduced a new “Non-Editing Contributor” role, which is a WordPress user account that can be assigned to content as an author but cannot edit any content or access any features in the WP admin dashboard.

You’ll find this new role in the Role dropdown when creating a new user or editing existing user accounts.

See: newspack-plugin/3066

Hotfixes since May 15

We’ve been hard at work quashing bugs and improving stability across our repos since the last release cycle. Here’s a quick roundup of some important changes that have already been released since May 15:

• [Reader Activation] Active subscriptions (if available) will now be the primary source of data used to sync reader data to the connected ESP, instead of the most recent order. This should fix things for sites who have migrated subscribers from a non-Newspack revenue platform, as these subscribers will have active subscriptions but no order history in WooCommerce. newspack-plugin/3141
• [Reader Activation] Improved the stability of the Google SSO (single sign-on) feature for reader accounts. Registering or logging in via SSO should now be much more reliable for all readers. newspack-plugin/3106, newspack-plugin/3113, newspack-plugin/3117, newspack-plugin/3119
• [Campaigns] Fixed a bug affecting sites NOT using Reader Activation only, which caused newsletter signups via the Newspack Newsletters Subscription block to not properly segment the reader as a newsletter subscriber for Campaigns. newspack-plugin/3127
• [Newsletters] Fixed several bugs affecting Mailchimp connections. newspack-newsletters/1499, newspack-newsletters/1504