Contact Us and Mailing List plugin

May 1st, 2008

This plugin for wordpress v2+ does two things:
Firstly, it is a mailing list manager with subscribe, unsubscribe and export list functionality.
Secondly it generates a ‘contact us’ form which allows users of your site to get in touch without the need for you to publish your email address. At this stage the user can opt-in to your mailing list with a simple tick box.

Installation Instructions

Download the .zip archive from here, extract the contents and upload to your wordpress plugins folder.
To setup your outgoing SMTP email server details, open settings.php (or smtp_settings.ini if you have a copy of the v0.1 plugin) with your favourite text editor and add in the server URI and your access credentials. Once this step is complete, you are ready to Activate the plugin through the wordpress plugin control panel.

Instructions for Use

Contact Us form

To create a ‘contact us’ form in a wordpress post or page is simple. Create a page (or post) for the form, and open the HTML editor - please note you must complete this next step while in HTML editing mode, if you perform this step in visual mode then it won’t work! Copy & paste the following html code snippet into the editor.
<!-- contact_us -->
If you preview the page, you should see that this code has been replaced with the wpcalm contact us form.

Mailing List

Creating a mailing list on your blog is just as easy. Create a post or page for the sign-up form and paste the following code into the HTML mode editor in wordpress.
<!-- mailing_list -->
The preview should show that, again, the code has been replaced in your page with the sign-up form for your mailing list.

To download the entire mailing list in .csv format, go to Manage->Export Mailing List within your wordpress administration area.

This plugin works well enough and is pretty stable and robust, although there are definately elements that could be improved on so I ask you to feedback to me any problems you might have, any suggestions for improvements, your thoughts basically. I’ll leave comments open on this page for this purpose.

Download the plugin here, unfortunately at this stage there is no further documentation to go with it, so see how far you get and if that doesn’t work then email me and I’ll have a bash at explaining it to ya.