Satollo

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May be a blogger already has a list of subscribers to be used. So there is the feature that permit to import such list of user.

The import process and the data needed is really simple: a csv formatted text with email and name. Using the “import” panel, just past the csv text in the textarea and press import.

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We can discuss subscription process for days. I choosed for a double opt in process, just because in Italy seems the privacy rules (and laws) require it. I really don’t know if it’s true and if we need to make our life complicated to protect dumb people who press “subscribe” without reading disclaimer, rules and notes.

So the subscription process can be broken up in the steps below:

1. a user lands on the newsletter page: this is the subscription step where the users are asked for name and email
2. he types in his data and press “subscribe”: this is the first opt in
3. a message is shown in the page saying the data was stored and an email sent to confirm the subscription
4. the user checks his mailbox and finds a confirmation email with a link to be followed to activate the subscription
5. the user press that link and a “subscription confirmed” message is shown

Text shown in steps 1, 3, 5 are fully customizable within the newsletter configuration panel.

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The subscription form is automatically added inside the newsletter page (read here for the concept of newsletter page) just below the introductory text you are free to modifiy withing the configuration panel.

In the pictures below an example of newsletter page as it appears on the subscription step and the configuration panel where to modify the introductory text.

The green box identify the text displayed and where to write it. Click on pictures to enlarge them.

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Waiting to collect enough to write a decent official page for my newsletter plugin, some words are needed to explain it’s setup. After installing and activating the plugin (as we do with any other plugin) we firstly need to create a newsletter page.

So follow the steps below:

• open the Pages menu (on the left of your WP admin area) and press “add new”
• give a title to the new page, something like “newsletter subscription”
• put in the page content the tag [ newsletter ] (with NO spaces between the square brackets and the word “newsletter”)
• publish the page

The page will get a permalink: we need it to configure the newsletter plugin. May be in the future I can “automate” this step. The permalink can be something like http://www.satollo.com/english/newsletter. You can open your new page and copy the address from your browser. I hope this step is not complicate for people which would use and send newsletters…

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Ok, the version 1.0.0 has just been committed. I don’t know howmuch time the WordPress plugin repository takes to make it available, but the address should be this.

I’m putting up an official page for this new plugin here.

I would start dissecting the subscription process. I think we can start with a simple assumption: the subscription consists (in its first step) to show a form asking two things: name and email.

An effective “email marketing” or a simple “keep in touch” with your subscribers needs to be personal and direct. If we collect the name of our subscribers, we can write emails like:

Hi John,

can you buy this so I can earn something today?

Customizing emails with name leads to a problem: a single mail for each subscriber has to sent. This is a resource consuming process, but the are no other way to insert the receiver name in the email body.

Since this is my preferred way to send newsletter, I opt for it! May be we can implement a “mass mail” mode, where one or more email with many users in “hidden carbon copy” are sent.

So the subscription first step is a form with name and email fields. Both required.

Now, how can we insert such a form in a WordPress page?

WordPress has “short tags”, like [aaabbbccc]. It is really easy to define our short tag with the ability to insert a subscription form. Ususlly it will be done in a dedicated WordPress page.

Subscription page may need some introductory text that explains the big advantage to subscribe. And after the subscription something has to be shown to the subscriber, at least a thank you message.

We can follow two ways: a page for the subscription form and a page for the “thank you” message or a single page dedicated to our newsletter system with all the text configured in the newsletter admin panel.

The first way is the more flexible, but an average user may have problem in creating a single page: creating two or more pages can be too much hard.

I’m working on refacing a newsletter module for a proprietary CMS. This module has a lot of functions both for the subscribers and for the admin. So I thought that it woule be nice to make a WordPress plugin for managing a subscriber list. I think there are such kind of plugins, but creating one from zero can be an useful experiment.

Would you partecipate? I will code all the PHP, what I need is ideas to make it simple to use but enough complex to be useful!

To start a bit of analysis, we need to think about the subscription process.

• what kind of data do we want to ask the subscriber (other than his email)? That data will be optional or required? The blog owner has to have control on the data asked to the subscriber?
• The subscription process has to be a double opt-in process? The rules in Italy seems to require it! And you opinion is?

I’ve already writted this plugin, this id the truth, but I have not test it… And I can assure that the complex part is not the subscription process, but the unsubscription one…

I wait you comments… each contributor will receive a free copy of the pro version of this plugin (if a day there will be one…)