If you’re looking for a free newsletter tool for your installation of WordPress and have less than 2,000 subscribers, the WPNewsman plug-in is fairly nice. They allow you to style your newsletters, entering shortcodes for post-specific content, as well as the post entries and separators. Once finished, you have the option of selecting by author, category, and date range, and creating a newsletter to use excerpts, fancy excerpts (which includes html), and full post content. Unfortunately, the full post content turns HTML into text and removes paragraph breaks, leaving one giant mass of text and html code, commingled.

To fix this, simply open the class.utils.php file and skip to Line 494.

This will replace all caption shortcodes with nothing, effectively leaving a “text only” version:

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function cutScripts($src) {
        return preg_replace('@<script[^>]*>[\s\S]*?@i', '', strip_shortcodes($src));
}

This will replace all caption shortcodes with the linked image & italicized caption in its own paragraph:

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function cutScripts($src) {
        //return preg_replace('@<script[^>]*>[\s\S]*?@i', '', strip_shortcodes($src));
        $src = preg_replace('@<script[^>]*>[\s\S]*?@i', '', $src);
        return(preg_replace("/\[caption(.*)caption=\"(.*)\"\](.*)\[\/caption\]/i", "

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“, $src)); }

Download the code, here.

Otherwise, we recommend using StreamSend for all your newsletter needs. It isn’t free, but it’s a great alternative to MailChimp and Constant Contact, and priced competitively.