http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/enhanced-emails/

While there is a significant amount of coding and designing required, I consider testing the most important part of this task – we need to make absolutely sure that everybody can read their emails no matter what device and software they use. That said, apart from preparing a slick design, part of my task will be making sure that everyone can see it at its best. Looking at the coding side, I will write a customizable wrapper, which will allow to easily modify the custom behaviour via plugins or other similiar solutions.

I want to have an alpha version as soon as July 1 to have enough time for testing (I bounced it off Andrew Nacin, who said it’s a good idea ). You can see my proposed schedule below.

The first part of the schedule, between now and may 23 will consist mostly of getting community feedback concerning my idea and evaluating the existing plugins. Also, determining the file structure for email themes. For now, there are a few existing plugins, allowing to send HTML e-mails from WordPress: HTML E-mails , which generates very nice results such as:

Other existing solutions are the News Mailer , Subscribe2 and Mailpress. The first design sketches prepared in May will be informative and are meant for discussing specific implementation details, such as the presence of specific action links in the e-mails (see the image above as an example), and also are meant to determine specific styling details, such as number of header types, number of sections in the e-mails etc (by sections I mean the “user info”, “message content”, “header”, “action links/buttons”, “WP page info” parts.

The prototyping period which is until june 5 is meant to provide ready-to-use default e-mail templates and HTML/CSS code to use in WordPress. In the same time, I will be modding the core features to meet the requirements of action links and customizability of the e-mail sections. The latter is not likely to be an extensive task, as most of the desired actions are already there in the plain text e-mails as well. A starting point for coding the mailing part itself will be the wp_mail function located at pluggable.php#271.

Recently Ryan McCue patched wp_mail() so that the user could easily send multipart emails with an array as the body parameter. It is as simple as specifying correct value for keys of ‘text/plain’ and ‘text/html’. This refers to ticket #15448 and the related patch.

It is worth noting, that currently WP is using the open source PHP Mailer class written by Andy Prevost and Brent R. Matzelle. The first step is making use of features existing in this class – it has very basic HTML support, but it’s better than nothing. One of the goals of the project is creating a wrapper, which will take care of the HTML mailing – a piece of code “between” wp_mail and PHPMailer itself. The wrapper will allow the developers to mod html sending features, and the users – to easily customize their experience. The developers will be able to extend the html mailing by using filters and plugins. An optional element of the project (depends on the community input, I got some positive reviews of this idea so far but it needs further investigation due to its complexity) is to provide an element in the admin panel, which would allow users to specify basic features from the UI side – styling, the ability to turn on/off html emails etc.

The IRC discussion on 06.04 brought the conclusion, that email themes should be linked with “overall” site themes. The file structure will be consistent with the current Template Hierarchy: the idea is to have a generic email.php file used for notifications. If a specific email-{actionname}.php file exists, it has priority over the generic theme file.

Another optional idea is including a <video> tag with a tutorial in the “welcome” email sent to the blog admin. Thanks to html5 it is possible to easily embed videos in emails and it would be a nice way to introduce WordPress to new developers.

An important part of the last period, which is due to august 22, is testing and bugfixing. The goal of the project is to implement high quality code which will make it to the WordPress core. This means a lot of testing to ensure usability, readability and accessibility. I will be performing mobile and desktop tests, as well as fixing and improving the already implemented functionalities. Also, it will be a great time for extending the wrapper customization features – there may be some community requests and if I manage to finish all my scheduled tasks early, this will be the way to go…

While working on the Apocalypse Online project I was involved in lots of advanced interface design/programming. Also, many of my last year’s tasks where interface-related, so I am fully confident that I can provide a working solution which can be incorporated into WordPress.

Fun fact #1:

It takes at average 14 minutes to fall asleep.

Many people fail on the planning stage, by scheduling too much or too little sleep time. With my 20 min-naps I set the alarm for exactly 35 minutes – I tested and it works best!

Fun fact #2:

20 min naps are much easier to adapt to for most people, compared to the 30mins-long ones.

I didn’t find any reliable research in this matter, but some polyphasic bloggers claim, that it matches some kind of rythm of human body, and if you sleep over 30 minutes while not fully adapted to a polyphasic schedule, you may wake up in the middle of a deeper sleep phase. My experience matches with this, I feel much more alert after a 20-minute nap than I was after 30 mins. Moreover, I stopped oversleeping after switching to shorter naps.

After a few weeks of experimenting with polyphasic sleep I’m still away from fully adapting the Uberman schedule. I’m not even close to lucid dreaming or meditation as well, however I have noticed a significant increase in sleep awareness – I remember my dreams much more often, which is kind of fun.

According to Claudio Stampi, MD, PhD, founder and director of the Chronobiology Research Institute in Boston, there’s flexibility within our normal need. Through his work with “polyphasic ultrashort” napping techniques, Stampi has found you can reduce your normal “need” sleep by 10%-25% for the long term and as much as 50% for the short term by trimming the nighttime sleep cycle and adding several short naps throughout the day. (See “Night Moves” below.) “The longer, uninterrupted sleep that humans have developed is rare,” he says. “Eighty-five percent of species follow a multiple-napping pattern. For NASA, we conducted research to determine if we could become more efficient sleepers by dividing our sleep into nap episodes.”

You can read the full article here.

The target nap time is 30 minutes. I will try to post continuous updates here evere day to make keeping track of my goals easier.