Wordpressing

This morning I processed a couple of photos, then looked into Wordpress mailing list plugins again. The one I found yesterday was Subscribe to comments, but I also wanted users to be able to subscribe to new blog posts / newsletters.

One of the commenters on the Subscribe to comments plugin page said:

I’ve seen that some other blogs have two checkboxes under the comment box, the first being ‘subscribe to comments’ and the second being ‘subscribe to email newsletter’. I have a feedburner email newsletter and I’d love to give commentors the option on opting in, especially since they’re already entered their email address.

So I looked into Feedburner, and while you can easily add a subscribe to posts via feedburner widget to your blog, it doesn't look easy to integrate the ability to subscribe via feedburner into your comment form.

Feedburner also uses a form for users to subscribe to the email service, and obviously it requires a different action URL to the action URL of your comment form. So I think what would be required is a plugin that intercepts the comment submission, POSTs to the feedburner email subscribe page for your feed (using cURL), and then processes the comment submission normally.

I did search for feedburner plugins for wordpress, but couldn't see any that offered this functionality.

So next I found another plugin called Newsletter. I tried to test it, but had a problem creating a page with the [Newsletter] shortcode.

After getting the Newsletter plugin working, I found it didn't offer what I wanted, so I thought that maybe I would have to write my own plugin to allow subscribing to feedburner email updates via the comment form.

I checked my email and then had lunch.

After lunch I went out in the back garden and took a few photos. The Montbretia was looking very nice, but there were loads of wasps around it so I had to keep running away when they came near me. Then I found a friendly moth, so I took quite a few photos of that.

I came back in, and decided to have a look at the Subscribe2 Wordpress plugin before attempting to write my own plugin. It took me ages to find out what the 'token' was I needed to use to get the subscription form to display. The various FAQs for Subscribe2 mention the token, but don't actually specify what it is. After some googling I eventually found out that it is %lt;!--subscribe2-->

After getting the plugin working, I found it looked quite good. But I didn't like that the registration form only asked for the email address. I couldn't see any option to add subscribing as a tickbox option in the comment form either.

So I did some more googling and found a post that showed how to make your own Wordpress registration form where the user sets their own password: Fast and Easy Custom WordPress New User Registration. But I didn't want users to have to set their own password, I wanted what that post described there as the default Wordpress behaviour - Wordpress sets the password for them automatically.

So I did yet more googling, and found this post: How do I turn on user registration in Wordpress site? That said that you just need to enable user registration in the control panel, and then a 'register' link will appear in the 'meta' widget on the sidebar.

I don't have the meta widget showing on my themes, since I didn't want a link to the wp-login area on the blog. So I added the meta widget to the sidebar to check, but it didn't have any register option when I was logged out. So I tried the TwentyTen theme, and then the old Kubrick theme, but still no register option in the sidebar.

Then I checked the options in the Wordpress admin panel, and guess what - the option to allow anyone to register wasn't ticked! I must have ticked it on the live site or maybe a different wordpress installation. Anyway, after ticking it, the register option did appear in the meta sidebar widget.

I spent the rest of the day trying to get a register widget in my sidebar. I did get it working, but the Subscribe2 plugin doesn't include an unsubscribe link in the emails it sends out. The subscribe to comments plugin does have an unsubscribe link, but obviously doesn't give any way to unsubscribe from the general emails sent by the Subscribe2 plugin.

So it seems like I wasted most of today. The only thing I can think of is to try and write my own plugin, but that will take ages. Mainly due to the large number of different wordpress functions that are available - trying to find if a function exists, then if it does exist, if it does what I want, or if it can be filtered to do what I want, or if I have to write my own code.