In the last weeks, I’ve been helping a friend creating an institutional website, using WordPress 2.0.
One of the features he wants to implement is a subscriber form with a newsletter manager. We are not talking about a simple plugin, which allows people to signup to be notified when a new entry is posted to your blog/website. We are talking about a more complex plugin, which would allow people to subscribe to a traditional newsletter.
1. First we tried Mailing List Plugin 3.0 (available at http://gerard.ly.free.fr/index.php?page=wordpress). It’s not perfect, but it works. This plugin allows you to send an email or send a newsletter automatically to the mailing-list when a number of new post are published. Doesn’t work with WordPress 2.0.
2. Then we tried WP-PHPList plugin (available at http://www.funkypenguin.co.za/wp-phplist), which integrates our WordPress installation with our PHPList public pages. This looked fine, perfect for our needs. I already use PHPlist (http://tincan.co.uk/phplist) with no complains, so it would be perfect WordPress + PHPlist.
After a lot of work, it works, but with a few important cons:
- The last version of PHPlist is 2.10.2. The plugin only work with PHPlist 2.9.4;
- It’s very difficult (I think I can say: impossible) to customize subscribe page, with your WordPress theme design;
3. Last but not least, we tried a last solution, integrating WordPress 2.0 with our PHPList, last version, but without any plugin. It’s not simple but after a few tweaks, it works just fine.
As so, my next post one of my next posts, which I expect to publish in the next days (updated at 19h00 – 20/01/2006), will be “How to integrate WordPress 2.0 and PHPlist 2.10.2”.
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