And I think my main issue is that MailPress doesn’t give me the option to configure an email per user (or if it does I can’t find it). But I tried that option in Subscribe2, and the Personalise plugin worked perfectly.

Thank you very much for clarifying the issue. That was an immense help!

The “mailing” MUST be going to one person at a time (obviously?). For example in Subscribe2 one can configure bulk emails or an email per user. If one specifies an email per user, then personalisation can work as it looks up the user to which the email is being sent and uses those details. The personalisation plugin cannot work if a single bulk email is being sent to many people at one time.

The plugin or functionality doing the email must allow wordpress to apply the filters and shortcodes to the content. (It is possible for a plugin to switch those off, or depending how mailpress is written, it may simply not apply them. )

The brackets [] are not my invention – this is wordpress syntax into which one could put a shortcode if one hasd an active plugin that would process that shortcode. When wordpress processes the content it checks to see if there is a shortcode (created by itself or a plugin) with that shortcode and then applies it. If nothing it just leaves the text unchanged – hence [test] stays as that unless someone has an active “test” shortcode.

Hope that helps!

I enter “[test]” because when I enter “[user]” the email displays a blank space at the location where “[user]” is typed, and I was trying to see if MailPress thought that brackets were some kind of code.

Anyway, I wonder if my problem has to do with writing a post and then using MailPress to email that post. If I’m logged in, the post displays the “nice name” on the blog webpage, and if I receive the post in an RSS feed, the text displays the “default text to display if no user name,” which is “reader.”

It’s only when I enter “[user]” into a post, which is automatically emailed to my users through MailPress, that nothing shows up. The “nice name” and the “default text to display if no user name” do not show up at all, it’s just a blank space.

are you logged : then are your name fields populated ? if you are logged in I assume, it will look up your “nice name”.
if not logged in : got o the plugin settings – is the default text to display populated eg: with something “reader”. See http://webdesign.anmari.com/plugins/personalise/

with regard to emails going out – why are you entering [test]?
Follow the same syntax – the shortcode is always [user] and then you can add parameters and have eg: [user user_email] if you want the email address rather than the user nice name.