How to enable Newsletter support to Wordpress
based website or blog with Newsletter or E-mail Newsletter
plugin
One of the companies, where I'm doing a part time job, as an
IT
Consultant, System Administrator and Web developer, a e-marketing
specialist and business consultant (the list goes on ;)) ...
planned to
integrate a Newsletter support in their Wordpress
based websites.
As this fits my "job description" ,I took the task and implemented
a simple but functional Newsletter support to their 4 WP based
sites. In this article I will in short describe, my experience with
placing the Newsletter subscription.:
Earlier I've done something similar as, I've added a
subscipriotion (form) box to Wordpress to use Google Feedburner
RSS . What I needed this time, however was a bit different. The
company required the newsletter to be a separate one and don't
relay on
Google Feedburner (RSS) to deal with the
subscriptions .
It took me a while until I came with a working version of a
Newsletter and I actually tested all in all 4 newsletter wordpress
plugins before, I had a well working one. Here in short, In this
article I will shortly take a look at the 4 WP newsletter
plugins:
1. A wordpress plugin called simply Newsletter
As of time of writting this is the most popular wordpress plugin,
when I looked through:
- http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
Wordpress Newsletter plugin can be obtained via
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/newsletter/ It is
Advanced and probably the most superior free newsletter for WP. The
plugin supports email subscriber user confirmation (double opt-in),
as well as can be accustomized to work with single opt-in.
For all those who don't know
Double Opt-In is the technical
term for a once requested user email (single opt-in), for
subscription which is later confirmed by following an email box
sent link pointing to confirmation URL.
Double Opt-In is almost a standard and "must" as otherwise, many
spam bots will fill in randomly email addresses and your
subscribers list will be mostly containing spammer email
addresses.
1. Install Wordpress Newsletter Plugin To install Newsletter
plugin;
a) download and put into
wp-content/plugins/ and
unzip
server:~# cd /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins
server:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# wget -q
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/newsletter.zip
server:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# unzip
newsletter.zip
b) Enable in Plugins:
Plugins -> Newsletter (Activate)
c) Configure Newsletter
A new menu will appear in the left WP control panel, like you see
in below screenshot:
Newsletter plugin is very configurable but it takes a bit of
longer time until it is confingured to work well. So be patient
with it.
d) Make
Newsletter field appear on a wordpress home
page.
In order to enable just configure Newsletter plugin (text and
subscription form) to appear on the wordpress pages, you need to
add the plugin as a widget. To do so go to:
Appearance -> Widgets
Drag and drop the Newsletter plugin widget to the widget right
pane. Put it on the exact place you would like it to appear.
Once the widget is placed, you will see it appear to the respective
location on
WP pages, you should have something like:
If while you enable the plugin and put the Newsletter widget
doesn't appear on Wordpress, this is probably due to some
Cache left from some enabled WP caching pugin like W3 Total
Cache
In any case if Newsletter form subscription, is not appearing on
your pages, delete the
cache/ directory:
# rm -rf
/var/www/wordpress-site/wp-content/cache/
I've experienced, this caching problems and it was quite a riddle,
until I found out that the Newsletter plugin is not appearing on
the WP pages because of the old cache. I've checked bacicly
everything (
error.log , apache php_error.log) etc.. Therein,
there was no error or anything, so after a long 1 hour or so
poundering I figured out this kind of caching done by
W3
Cache.
My guess is, the same newsletter "not working" issue is probably
observable also on WP installs with other caching plugins like
WP Hyper Cache or WP Db Cache
2. ALO EasyMail Newsletter Wordpress plugin
I don't know, why but this plugin didn't work properly on the
wordpress install, I've tested it. Its true the wordpress version
where I give it a try was not running, the latest stable wordpress
so I assume this might be the reason for the empty pages returned
when I enabled the plugin.
According to wordpress's plugin -
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/alo-easymail/, the
plugin is marked as
Works, however in my case it
didn't.
3. Adding Wordpress Newsletter through Email
newsletter
This plugin was a real piece of cake, compared to all of the rest,
tested this one was the easiest one to install and configure on
Wordpress.
Just like with
Newsletter and ALO EasyMail Newsletter once
the user is subscribed, from the admin there is possibility to sent
crafted messages to all subscribers.
The plugin is a great, choice for anyone who is looking for quick
install of Newsletter on Wordpress without extra "config"
complications.
Below is a quote describing
email newsletter, taken from the
plugin author webpage;
Advantage of this plugin
- Simple no coding required.
- Easy installation .
- Using this plug-in we can send email to all registered
folks.
- Using this plug-in we can send email to all comment posted
folks.
- Email subscribe box for front end
- Check box option available to select/unselect emails from the
send mail list.
- Integrated the email newsletter plugin & simple contact
form plugin
- Enabling the plugin is done via admin menus:
Plugins -> Inactive -> Email Newsletter
(enable)
Afterwards, the plugin requires a quick configuration from
wp-admin:
Email Newsletter -> Subscriber form
setting
You see in the screenshot, the config where to place the plugin is
trivial.
To make
Email Newsletter appear on the pages, you will have
to add the
Email Newsletter widget from:
Appearance -> Widgets
The widget looks like the one in below screenshot:
Drag and drop the widget to the widgets pane. Onwards on the
wordpress pages, should appear an email subsciption box:
Though
Email Newsletter is great, it has one serious
drawback, as it doesn't support
Double Opt-In. Therefore
people subscribing through it are not mailed with a request to
confirm their email subscription request.
As a result, its very likely many spam-bots submit fake emails in
the newsletter subscribe form and in 1 year time your newsletter
email list might get full with tens of thousands unexistent emails.
If you end up with this bad scenario, once newsletter emails are
sent to (regular) exitent subscribers, many of the bulk emails in
the list will never reach their senders, but will just fill-up the
mail server queue and take up server resources for nothing for one
week or so (depending on the email configuration keep undelivered
mail setting).
Anyways, since the basis of this plugin works fine, I'm sure if the
author modifies it to include a simple
Captcha instead of
double-opt functionality, the plugin can become top plugin.