The new ‘Newsletter Sign-up’ plugin – are you using it?
Last week i’ve released a new and improved version of ‘Qoate Newsletter Sign-up’, one of my older plugins for WordPress that adds a ‘Sign me up for your newsletter’ checkbox to your comment form. This makes it easy for your commenters to sign-up for your mailinglist and thus turn them into subscribers.
If you were previously using the ‘old’ plugin (Qoate Newsletter Sign-up) it is highly recommended that you start using Newsletter Sign-up right away. I recoded the whole thing from scratch resulting in much cleaner code, higher compatibility and probably the most important thing, better performance.
Not using the plugin yet? Care to read on why you should start using it?
What does this ‘Newsletter Sign-up’ plugin do exactly?
The plugin gives you the possibility to add a checkbox to your comment forms and your registration forms. Users who take the effort to comment on your posts are most likely dedicated readers of your blog and most likely they’d like to subscribe to your newsletter too. With this plugin enabled all they have to do is tick a checkbox and voila, they’re subscribed.
Behind the scenes and the CAN-SPAM act
As soon as this plugin detects that someone ticked the checkbox upon posting their comment it mimics the normal POST request that a user would do when subscribing to your newsletter trough a normal sign-up form. In most cases the subscriber will then receive a confirmation e-mail to make sure that they are willingly signing-up to your newsletter. This depends on your newsletter service and settings tho. This plugin is not silently subscribing your commenters, and thus not violating the CAN-SPAM act.
I want to boost my newsletter subscribers, how easy is this plugin to set-up?
I’ve made it as easy as possible. Pictures tell more then a thousand words so let me show you how this plugin will look in your WordPress backend.
As you can see you have the option to select one of the major newsletter services from a select list. This will help you by filling in some of the values that are used for everyone using that newsletter service. Then all that’s left for you is to select some information that is specific to your list. You can find all this information in a sign-up form that you would normally embed on your website. For more information on how to find this values take a look at “Configuring Newsletter Sign-up“.
If you’re not already using Newsletter Sign-up you should definetly give it a try and see what it does to your mailinglist. I hereby dare you to post some results after a few weeks of using this plugin.
Download Newsletter Sign-up from the WordPress repository now!
70 Responses to “The new ‘Newsletter Sign-up’ plugin – are you using it?”
Danny — March 28, 2011 at 8:01 am Not that I know of Antonio.
Are you sure that you are testing with an emailadress that is not already on your Mailchimp list? Mailchimp tends to ignore those emailadresses.
Antonio Perez — March 29, 2011 at 12:15 am I just created a new temp email and tested it again…still not working..
Danny van Kooten — March 29, 2011 at 7:34 am Check your inbox Antonio. :) And make sure to update to the latest version, small fix for slow servers.
Syamsul Alam — April 3, 2011 at 12:47 am I think your plugin does the terrific job, if only it is working on my blog. :)
I paste the newsletter action form in my new autoresponder (0 subscriber). I put http://profitsender.com/vip/ar/optin.php in the box. Insert the email name and fname name too. I log out, testing it.
Unfortunately, after waiting for several minutes, there are still no notification from and there are no new subscriber record found in my autoresponder.
Perhaps, that because the ‘actual’ form of my autoresponder also input several hidden value as identifier. I’m not really sure about this.
Your plugins is great anyway! And perhaps you will consider help me out with this.. :D
Syamsul Alam — April 3, 2011 at 1:27 am I just figure out the ‘additional data’ feature in your plugins.
You are the man. Great job with this plugins.
I’ll try to share this plugins to every blogger that I know. Thank you for your great plugins!
Colin Tate — April 13, 2011 at 2:36 pm Just wondering if you have any idea what is causing this error message on the backend when I approve a comment?
This is the default comment system, (3.1.1) with the latest version of your plugin. Its set to subscribe users via comments using YMLP – but turning that function off apparently does nothing to stop the error.
Here it is:
Warning: Missing argument 2 for Newsletter_SignUp::do_signup() in /home/filepath/oooohlookawebsite/wp-content/plugins/newsletter-sign-up/php/frontend.php on line 44
1302705826
C.
Danny van Kooten — April 13, 2011 at 3:09 pm Hi Colin,
Just committed a new version of the plugin which should fix this error. :) Small mistake on my side, sorry for that.
Let me know if it works for you.
Danny
Colin Tate — April 13, 2011 at 5:24 pm Heya,
Hi Danny,
Have just come back after a round of testing.
The error is fixed (yay), but ticking the newsletter signup box/approving comment once submitted isn’t passing the info across to YMLP. No error reports, no new member, nothing.
Seeing as the YMLP form I’ve created can insert a new user, and its the same info that’s in the newsletter settings, I’m thinking its probably not directly a YMLP issue.
C.
Colin Tate — April 14, 2011 at 6:47 pm Any thoughts?
Danny van Kooten — April 14, 2011 at 7:23 pm Hi Colin,
Hmm, can you send me an email trough my contact form providing an example of your YMLP sign-up form? I’ll have a play with it and send you the correct settings. :-)
Colin Tate — April 14, 2011 at 8:38 pm Heya, have just sent you along an example, along with the newsletter settings I’ve got going on. Hope that helps in the investigation :)
C.
David Whitehouse — April 20, 2011 at 8:38 am Hi there,
I’m having a bit of difficulty. I’ve got my API key and it is doing API calls but I’m getting a red icon on the API MailChimp page. It is recording each call though.
I’m using the correct list ID, and I’m using a unique email address.
My concern is I have two required fields First Name (FNAME) and Last Name (LNAME). Are these likely to be causing a problem?
Just doesn’t seem to be adding it, great plugin though!
Cheers,
David
Danny van Kooten — April 20, 2011 at 9:11 am Hi David,
I’m still working on a way to pass the first and last name seperately. For now, try this:
- Tick subscribe with name and use ‘FNAME’ as the name identifier.
- Add ‘LNAME’ as an additional data name and set it’s value to a space, or whatever you like.
This way it will send the commenter’s name as the FNAME and an empty string as the LNAME. MailChimp is now most likely refusing the sign-up request cause there is an argument missing. This will work around the problem.
Let me know how that works for you!
Colin Tate — April 20, 2011 at 1:16 pm I’ve just realised I hadn’t posted my public thanks to Danny for the work he has put in to make this Newsletter Sign-Up plugin as good as it is.
I had an issue a week ago, and raised it to Danny. He then took time out to address and fix the issue – which was both outstanding and fast.
Very happy to have met you Danny, and thanks for a great plug-in!
C.
David Whitehouse — April 20, 2011 at 2:38 pm Still not working, could it be because FNAME will include two words so it rejects it?
David Whitehouse — April 20, 2011 at 3:57 pm Nah can’t be that as I tried just using a first name.
Shame MailChimp doesn’t tell me why the API call fails!!!
Danny van Kooten — April 20, 2011 at 6:51 pm Colin, thanks a bunch mate. :) It’s all mutual.
David, drop me a line trough my contact form and i’ll send you a version of the plugin which will show you the MailChimp error page.
Neil J Lloyd — April 24, 2011 at 12:17 pm A much needed plug in. Had been looking for something like this for months.
Well done.
Works great.
suus — April 27, 2011 at 8:25 pm hoi Danny,
When I check ‘Subscribe with name?’ in the back-end and subscribe to our newsletter with a name, I get a 404 page. When I uncheck ‘Subscribe with name?’ and subscriabe again, I get the page where I was all the time. The subscription process works fine.
Thanks for helping out.
Groetjes,
Suus
Danny van Kooten — April 28, 2011 at 6:31 am Hoi Suus. :)
Do you get this when using the widget to sign-up or when posting a comment? I’ll have to look into it!
suus — April 28, 2011 at 8:07 am I get this using the widget. When posting in comments it works fine.
Danny van Kooten — April 29, 2011 at 7:40 am Hi Suus,
Thanks, I looked into it and you were spot on. There was a little conflict with WordPress itself when submitting the widget using an API and ‘subscribe with name’. I fixed it in v1.3.2 so please update the plugin and let me know how it worked for you. :-)
Groetjes, Danny!
roy — April 30, 2011 at 10:41 am internationalization would be great! in the previous version there was the possibility to customize at last the labels of the form fields. now i have to go into the code to change that manually after every update. :-(
Danny van Kooten — April 30, 2011 at 10:55 am Great suggestion Roy, thanks. Was thinking about it myself, turns out I made a typo in the email label as well hehe.. I’ll update ASAP.
roy — May 3, 2011 at 8:25 pm great service! is it possible to also give the “sign up”-button a custom name?
Cor van Noorloos — May 4, 2011 at 1:54 pm Was using Yoast’s suggestion before noticing this plugin.
Thus far everything is looking very impressive! And neatly written I have to add (:
Kelly Brady — May 5, 2011 at 12:51 am Just upgraded to it, and it works great w/Mailchimp. Actually like your plugin much better than Mailchimp’s similar plugin for WP. Your formatting is better. My theme doesn’t show the checkbox but I don’t need it anyway. Would love to see an option to change the length of the email address input box, as well as the text on the “Sign Up” button. Thanks again!
Danny van Kooten — May 10, 2011 at 5:57 pm @Kelly and Roy: Thanks! Have an eye out for the next version. I’ll add a field to edit the submit button’s value in the widget settings. :-)
@Cor, Thanks! There was a crappy version of this plugin before Yoast’s post on the subject. Redid the whole thing from scratch after reading it! Let me know if you see room for any improvements.
Cor van Noorloos — May 12, 2011 at 4:27 pm Hi Danny, except from the minor typo on the settings page (atleast instead of at least and perhaps email instead of e-mail a couple of times) I think your plugin runs pretty awesome.
Also, I have to say the adminbit is pretty neat.
I am thinking Mark Jaquith’s “Subscribe to Comments”, but as PHP isn’t my native language I can’t tell if it’s anything alike your plugin.
Bram — May 13, 2011 at 12:36 pm Hi,
I tried using your plugin tiogether with phplist, but somehow it won’t work too smoothly.
I configured phplist so it doesn’t need confirmation, so only the email address by itself should be enough,however the signup plugin doesn’t actually post the data.
So, It requests the subscribe page, then he fills out the email address, but there’s no submit, so I strand on the phplist subscription page, where I HAVE to click on submit again, otherwise it doesn’t work.
Is this by design? Or should the signup plugin submit the data automatically without be leaded through the actual PHPList signup page?
I hope you can help me.
Thanks anyway,
Bram
james dudley — May 20, 2011 at 8:20 am Hi Danny,
Great plugin. All works ok for me via posts on worpress to Mailchimp but not If I test sign up through the widget.
Any ideas?
Cheers
JM
james dudley — May 20, 2011 at 8:41 am Hi Again,
Just did another test through the widget and it worked perfectly!? Not sure what I changed but all good now.
Cheers,
JM
Dave Clements — May 21, 2011 at 10:11 pm I’m soooooooo glad this plugin finally got the refresh it deserved and needed. I had this installed several months ago and tried desperately to get it to work with MailChimp, but it just wasn’t working. I tried numerous other plugins, but there really isn’t another one like this. Thank you for your incredible development.
I was looking for a donate button here on your site, but I don’t see one…
Danny van Kooten — May 22, 2011 at 10:03 am @Dave,
Glad to hear you like it! I received your donation, thanks! Much appreciated. :-)
@Bram, looks like you’re submitting the data to the wrong page. You should be able to get it to work with PHPList without the default PHPList sign-up page. Drop me an email if you can’t get it to work, i’ll try to help. :)
Cher — June 5, 2011 at 5:51 pm Hi Danny.
Thanks for the amazing plugin. It works like a charm.
How can I change the background color of the widget?
Thanks!
Danny van Kooten — June 5, 2011 at 6:33 pm Hi Cher,
No problem, glad you like it! You can style the widget using normal CSS. Have a look in your source code for the widget’s unique ID so you can use that as a selector or style the form using the class nsu-form. :-)
Cher — June 5, 2011 at 6:40 pm Thanks for the super quick reply! I hate to be a bother, but I have no idea where to find the class nsu-form. In my editor, I see these:
class.actions.php
(class.actions.php)
class.colors.php
(class.colors.php)
class.css.php
(class.css.php)
class.debug.php
(class.debug.php)
class.layout.php
(class.layout.php)
class.options.metapanel.php
(class.options.metapanel.php)
class.options.ui.php
(class.options.ui.php)
class.sections.php
(class.sections.php)
class.template.php
(class.template.php)
class.types.php
(class.types.php)
class.typography.php
(class.typography.php)
class.updates.php
(class.updates.php)
Danny van Kooten — June 6, 2011 at 7:20 am Hi Cher,
Actually I was refering to CSS classes but I take it you have no knowledge of CSS. No problem. ;) Copy (and alter to your likings) this line to your style.css file in your wp-content/themes/your-theme/ directory: form.nsu-form{ background: LightGray; }
Sofia — June 25, 2011 at 3:04 am Hi Danny:
Thanks for the great widget. It works great, but I’m wondering if there is any way to customize the width of the sign-up box? I am trying to use the widget in one of my WP site’s footer columns, and the box is too wide for the column.
Thanks.
Danny van Kooten — June 25, 2011 at 8:17 am Hi Sofia,
I took a quick look at your theme and the input field in the footer is exactly 300px wide because your stylesheet tells it to. You could add this line to the style.css file in /wp-content/themes/andelion_v2.6.1/ to make things work:
#footer input.nsu-field{ width: 185px; }
Hope that helps!
Hear Mum — June 25, 2011 at 12:36 pm Hi, I desperately want this to work on my site. I’m having two issues, though. I want the checkbox to show near comments, that’s all.
1) the checkbox appears below my ‘submit’ button, and I’d really like it above it, because I don’t think people will see it otherwise.
2) I can see the checkbox, but it just isn’t working. I’ll admit, I’m really struggling to understand the instructions and find the form action url.
Danny van Kooten — June 25, 2011 at 1:37 pm Go into your theme folder (wp-content/themes/yourthemename/) and look for a file named comments.php. Look for this line:
<?php do_action('comment_form', $post->ID); ?>
Cut that line and look for a piece of HTML that looks somewhat like this:
<input name="submit" type="submit" class="submit" id="submit" tabindex="5" value="<?php _e('Reply'); ?>" />
Paste the snippet you just copied above that line and the checkbox should appear above your button.
Regarding your 2nd question, i’ll try to make update the instructions page tomorrow. Have you already tried implementing things by using the MailChimp API? That should make things easier for you. If you can’t get it to work, come back tomorrow and take a look at Configuring Newsletter Sign-up.
Hear Mum — June 25, 2011 at 1:57 pm No, I haven’t used the API yet. Will try your ideas, thanks for your quick answer.
Hear Mum — June 25, 2011 at 2:12 pm Ok, I’m going to show just how clueless I am here, lol! Do you mean I should do this via the control panel? I looked on WP admin panel and couldn’t see a place to do this, hence my question
Hear Mum — June 30, 2011 at 7:56 am I’ve tried the advice and copied/pasted successfully, but now the checkbox is gone altogether
Danny van Kooten — July 3, 2011 at 1:41 pm Are you sure you’ve ticked the checkbox in the back end that asks to show a checkbox at your comment form? ;)
Hear Mum — July 4, 2011 at 9:45 am I had, but after doing the copy/paste, I looked. I had it set to ‘hide after subscribing’, and after I stopped that hide feature, it’s working again, and above the submit button! Thanks so much!
Danny van Kooten — June 25, 2011 at 1:39 pm Thanks Sofia, much appreciated! Glad you got it to work! :)
Parley — June 28, 2011 at 10:58 pm Hi there Danny,
I just installed your plugin and I’m using iContact. I’m not sure which of the additional fields I need to use. The checkbox is showing up, but nothing happens when I leave a comment, check the box and click submit.
Thanks,
Parley
Danny van Kooten — July 3, 2011 at 8:31 am Parley,
I’m working on a detailed post (with pictures) on how to configure Newsletter Sign-up, please be patient. I’ll drop you a line when it’s finished, should be a piece of cake then following the ‘guide’. :-)
Danny van Kooten — July 3, 2011 at 1:40 pm Check it out: Configuring Newsletter Sign-up. Does that help?
Monique — July 1, 2011 at 9:28 am Yes, of course I use it. I even try to integrate the checkbox in http://contactform7.com/. That should work.
Erik — July 2, 2011 at 11:34 pm Very very ncie plugin!!
I’d ideally like to have even more options on costumizing the look of the signup form. For example my widget signup form now has a big EMAIL just next to the signup form. I am using Mailchimp and it seems I need to have this name in the settings for the subscriptions to work.
But anyway, qwesome plugin! Looking forward to hearing the news from your site :) !
Erik — July 2, 2011 at 11:48 pm BTW, any chance of getting this plugin integrating with a contact form? For example this: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/
:-)
Danny van Kooten — July 3, 2011 at 8:29 am Hi Erik,
Thanks, glad you like it! I like the idea of integrating NSU with contact form 7. I’m going to look into it to see if they provide any hooks where I can hook into. If so, it won’t be that hard at all. :-)
I’m with you on having more options to style the sign-up form although I find it hard on how to best accomplish this, so for now i’m sticking with the CSS way like most other plugins that provide forms do. If you come across a plugin that has a neat way of styling forms, let me know so I can have a look!
Fran — November 23, 2011 at 10:27 am Hi there,
Love the plugin but struggling to get it working with Mailchimp using the API now that I’ve upgraded the plugin :( – any specific settings / config I should check!
Fran
Manco — August 2, 2012 at 11:19 am Hi Danny,
I ‘d like to use newsletter-sign-up.1.7.3 together with Phplist, i filled out all the informations (form action, email identifier etc..) but when i submit on signup plugin it only fills out the email address in the phplist subscribe page and i have to submit again on the phplist subscribe page form otherwise it doesn’t work.
So i wonder if the signup plugin submit the data automatically without be leaded through the actual PHPList signup page?
I hope you can help me.
Thanks anyway,
Manco
ps: sorry but i don’t speak english very well but i hope you ‘ll understand what my problem is.
Danny van Kooten — August 3, 2012 at 4:52 am Hi Manco,
Do you have an online (working) example where I can look into this behavior? I believe there have been others who reported the same with PHP List and I’m not sure if there is a workaround yet. I’ll have to look into it.
Your English ain’t that bad by the way! :)
ELowe — August 3, 2012 at 5:45 pm Hi Danny:
Love the plugin, and am considering using it on a site I’m currently customizing a Thesis theme for.
One issue, however… the trial pages featuring the signup form won’t validate. In the strict doctype, a block-level element has to follow “form,” and “input” doesn’t qualify.
I can fix this by editing the front end file, but it’s something I’ll have to do every time I install an update. Any chance of a fix for this?
Danny van Kooten — August 3, 2012 at 5:46 pm Hi ELowe,
Sounds legit, I’ll look into it and fix this! Thanks.
ELowe — August 3, 2012 at 6:00 pm Thanks Danny!
I just hit the “donate” button for your time – much appreciated. :-)
Danny van Kooten — August 3, 2012 at 6:30 pm Well received ELowe, very much appreciated! Decided to look into your issue right away, I assume you are using additional (static) fields? Since the rest of the <input /> tags are wrapped in paragraphs.
I am now pushing 1.7.5 which has hidden inputs wrapped too. :-)
ELowe — August 3, 2012 at 6:56 pm Yes, I saw the p tags; yet the W3C validator seemingly does not.
Here’s the W3C’s verdict on this page: http://www.elissaverse.com/ufb (the form is in the footer).
Nesting each field inside the form with div tags solves the validation issue, but as hacks go, it’s not a very elegant one, lol.
ELowe — August 3, 2012 at 7:02 pm LOL – I’m an idiot. Didn’t process that last line about having the hidden inputs wrapped… which is the issue, of course.
ramelli — April 13, 2013 at 8:41 am Hello Danny,
Love that plug in, only problem is that I get a lot of spam about 50 mails per day into my mail chimp, any idea how to solve that ?
Serge
Thanks for this awesome plugin. For some reason I can’t get this plugin to work correctly. I’m using mailchimp and I’ve pasted the form action code string correctly.
Are there any plugins that are known to have a conflict with this plugin?