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PHP programming startup advice usability web 2.0

WordPress: inline “signup email” drop into post or sidebar

My blog posts are info-rich and spam-poor. Most of the “enter your email address” plugins are designed for spam – covered in bling, in-your-face animations, background music, all sorts of crap.

There’s nothing out there, so I made one, using a GPL’d existing project. Feel free to use this yourself.

note: this is an image, not a form!
Screen Shot 2013-06-13 at 13.48.14

What?

I wanted something like the screenshot above. I also wanted it to track WHAT the person was signing-up for! I found a plugin that would do:

  • inline
  • no stupid bling
  • styleable
  • shows all the emails inside the WordPress admin-panel

But it was missing some MAJOR features:

  • It only allowed ONE MAILING LIST EVER (!)
  • It was styleable – but forced some crappy styling, e.g. “submit button is always on a newline of its own”

So I fixed it.

Download

I contacted the original author, and tried to give them the source with the above fixes and improvements, but it’s been a month and they’ve ignored my emails.

So, I’m just going to stick it here for direct download: mail-subscribe-list-2.0.7.adam-3

Basic instructions (original plugin)

The original plugin is here (author doesn’t reply to emails): http://wordpress.org/plugins/mail-subscribe-list/

New instructions (fixed plugin)

I have added two new parameters that you include in the wordpress shortcode:

“submitonnewline” – possible values: “true” (if you enter ANYTHING here, it treats it as “true”)
“mailinglist” – possible values: “any string you like” (defaults to: “Default”)

Here’s an example of using it:

[smlsubform emailtxt=”This game is in development. Signup for updates:” showname=” mailinglist=”deathmatch-dungeon-pre”]

…which generates this form (real form – don’t signup unless you WANT to get info about the game I’m making !)

[smlsubform emailtxt=”This game is in development. Signup for updates:” showname=” mailinglist=”deathmatch-dungeon-pre”]