Created by: Andrew Neil Version: 1.0 Contact: andrew.jr.neil AT gmail DOT com
This is an extension for Radiant CMS, which lets you create subscriber lists, e.g. for subscription to a newsletter.
This is essentially a stripped down version of Andrea Franz excellent Newsletter extension. The subscriber lists extension does not require you to configure ActionMailer to send emails, so if your unsure how to do that, you may prefer to use this instead of the Newsletter extension.
This extension uses the ‘fastercsv` gem, so if you don’t already have it installed, run:
sudo gem install fastercsv
This extension is hosted on github. If you have git installed, then ‘cd` to the root of your radiant project and issue this command:
git clone git://github.com/nelstrom/radiant-subscriber-lists-extension.git vendor/extensions/subscriber_lists
If you don’t have git, then you can instead download the tarball from this URL:
http://github.com/nelstrom/radiant-subscriber-lists-extension/tarball/master
and expand the contents to ‘your-radiant-project/vendor/extensions/subscriber_lists`.
Once you have the extension added to your radiant project, you can run the rake task:
rake radiant:extensions:subscriber_lists:install # and/or rake RAILS_ENV="production" radiant:extensions:subscriber_lists:install
Create a subscriber list page by running the following task:
rake radiant:extensions:subscriber_lists:page:new
This will create a subscriber list called “Newsletter”, with all the necessary page parts.
If you want to have a registration form present on pages besides the “Subscription List” page itself, the following would make a good snippet for, say, a sidebar:
<r:unless_url matches="^/newsletter/?.*$">
<div id="enews">
<h2>Mailing List</h2>
<p>Receive updates by email</p>
<form action="/newsletter/subscribe/" method="post">
<fieldset>
<input type="text" name="subscriber[email]" class="text"/>
<input type="submit" value="Join" id="enews-submit"/>
</fieldset>
</form>
</div>
</r:unless_url>
The <r:unless_url> tag would ensure that this would not display in the sidebar when you are on the “/newsletter” page itself.
It is advised that you make it easy for your subscribers to remove themselves from a mailing list. Each time you send an email, you should provide a link for the user to unsubscribe, e.g.: localhost:3000/newsletter/unsubscribe
If you are using ‘Mail Merge’, or something similar, to insert customised text into individual emails, you might want to consider adding the email address to the link as a parameter, as follows:
http://localhost:3000/newsletter/unsubscribe?subscriber[email]=<email.of.recipient@example.com>
When the user clicks the link, the form will be prepopulated with their email address, saving them from having to type it.
(Note that for this to work, you should use the <r:subscriber_list:input_email /> tag provided, rather than using the HTML tag: <input type=“text” name=“subscriber” id=“subscriber_email”/>)