Subscriptions: allow pre-selecting newsletter categories in block settings

[holdercp]

Closes Automattic/loop#378

New to block development and Jetpack so please review with a critical eye.

Works in concert with 172401-gh-Automattic/wpcom

Proposed changes:

• Adds new options in the Subscriptions block settings that will allow site owners to select newsletter categories that this subscription form will automatically subscribe users to
• These selected categories will be exposed to the subscription form so the category selection modal can be bypassed when this new option is enabled

Other information:

• Have you written new tests for your changes, if applicable?
• Have you checked the E2E test CI results, and verified that your changes do not break them?
• Have you tested your changes on WordPress.com, if applicable (if so, you'll see a generated comment below with a script to run)?

Jetpack product discussion

• pe7F0s-2tV-p2 (current project)
• pe7F0s-2t7-p2 (abandoned project but has some of the discussion around this change)

Does this pull request change what data or activity we track or use?

Testing instructions:

• Follow documentation to checkout this branch on your sandbox
• Enable Newsletter Categories for your site and add a few
• Add a Subscribe block to a post
• In the Subscribe settings sidebar, under Settings, verify the new "Pre-select Categories" toggle works as expected
  • If enabled, you should be able to selected specific categories for the block
  • If disabled, you should not be able selected specific categories and they should be hidden
  • If enabled but all categories become unselected, it will become disabled automatically
  • Make sure when you save the block and visit it again the settings persist
  • Test that existing Subscribe blocks do not regress.
• These block settings have no effect currently but you can verify the correct category ids are being selected by examining the markup from the block. There will be a hidden input with the selected ids named selected_newsletter_categories

[github-actions]

Are you an Automattician? Please test your changes on all WordPress.com environments to help mitigate accidental explosions.

• To test on WoA, go to the Plugins menu on a WordPress.com Simple site. Click on the "Upload" button and follow the upgrade flow to be able to upload, install, and activate the Jetpack Beta plugin. Once the plugin is active, go to Jetpack > Jetpack Beta, select your plugin, and enable the add/newsletter-cats-to-sub-block branch.

• To test on Simple, run the following command on your sandbox:

  bin/jetpack-downloader test jetpack add/newsletter-cats-to-sub-block
  

Interested in more tips and information?

• In your local development environment, use the jetpack rsync command to sync your changes to a WoA dev blog.
• Read more about our development workflow here: PCYsg-eg0-p2
• Figure out when your changes will be shipped to customers here: PCYsg-eg5-p2

[github-actions]

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[github-actions]

Code Coverage Summary

Coverage changed in 5 files.

File	Coverage	Δ%	Δ Uncovered
projects/plugins/jetpack/extensions/blocks/subscriptions/subscriptions.php	10/622 (1.61%)	-0.01%	4 💔
projects/plugins/jetpack/extensions/blocks/subscriptions/controls.js	19/24 (79.17%)	4.17%	1 💔
projects/plugins/jetpack/extensions/blocks/subscriptions/view.js	0/43 (0.00%)	0.00%	1 💔
projects/plugins/jetpack/extensions/blocks/subscriptions/edit.js	45/54 (83.33%)	0.98%	0 💚
projects/plugins/jetpack/extensions/store/membership-products/resolvers.js	65/106 (61.32%)	8.49%	-9 💚

Full summary · PHP report · JS report

[holdercp]

This will need to be released after backend changes are in place. Leaving as draft for now but I would love a review to catch any obvious issues that will need to be addressed.

[eoigal]

One thing I noticed is that when I unchecked all categories, the pre-select option didn't uncheck as I expected.

[holdercp]

@eoigal Good suggested improvement. I've added it in 28bf74f.

[eoigal]

WFM, nice job!

[jeherve]

@holdercp I'm coming to this PR late, sorry, but I had a question about the user experience. Are you planning on updating the Jetpack settings in Jetpack > Settings > Newsletter to expand the Newsletter categories a bit? Right now, I don't think it's very clear that you can enable newsletter categories, and then have different groups of subscribers depending on the different subscribe blocks you set up on your site:

I wonder if it would also be worth updating the subscription modal as well. Right now it's not very clear what you're subscribing to with the different options:

---

Overall I think it's a great and useful new feature, we're essentially introducing a way to have multiple subscription lists on a single site, but I don't think we currently highlight that at all anywhere.

[holdercp]

@jeherve Those are great observations. I think the corresponding wpcom settings could be more clear as well:

Regarding the modal, I believe the idea is that the topic/category selection is abstracted away from the visitor and has already been pre-selected by the author. For example, an author could configure the subscribe blocks on their posts related to "Cooking" to automatically subscribe visitors subscribing via those blocks to the "Cooking" category.

There is a "Select which topics to subscribe to" screen in the modal flow, which will show up when newsletter categories are enabled and that is the default experience. Only when authors configure a subscribe block to automatically subscribe visitors to specific categories will that screen in the modal be skipped.

@davemart-in We don't really have a good "link" to the subscribe block feature from these settings screens. It's not very clear that visitors will get to choose which categories they want to subscribe to (in the default case, through the modal screen) or that authors can now pre-select specific categories that visitors will be automatically subscribed to if they configure the block to do so.

Maybe a copy update and a link to the subscribe block documentation might suffice here? What do you think?

[davemart-in]

I like that idea @holdercp. What do you think of updating the test to read:

Newsletter categories let visitors subscribe to specific topics. When enabled, only posts in the selected categories will be emailed. By default, subscribers can choose from your selected categories, or you can pre-select categories in the subscribe block.

[holdercp]

@davemart-in

Sounds great. I'll create some tickets.

Edit: ticket