Custom email list form (phpList)

[paulfParticipant]

Hi guys

 

How would I go about programming a hook in to phpList, rather than Mailchimp and AWeber?

I see the MCAPI.class.php file… would it be easiest just to modify that to call my phpList installation rather than the Mailchimp API?

Or is there a better way?

 

Kind regards,

Paul.

 

[ThomasKeymaster]

Hmm, I am a little confused about what you are trying to do. You just want to create an email form using a different email provider?

[paulfParticipant]

Yes that’s exactly want to do Thomas.

[ThomasKeymaster]

My best suggestion for doing this would be to take the custom HTML code from your email form and place it into a Thesis Text Box.

Then, add the classes built into Fatisfy to style your HTML code. These classes can be found on this forum reply.

Samples of Aweber & Mailchimp forms using custom HTML code can be found on this page to use as a reference of where the classes should be placed.

Hope this helps

• This reply was modified 10 years, 11 months ago by  Thomas.

[paulfParticipant]

great! Thanks, I will give it a shot.

[paulfParticipant]

For anyone else in the future, this is how I got it going as a sign up box on the home page. Everything is done in the wordpress back end, with no need to edit any files directly:

1. Thesis > Skin Editor

2. Select the template for the home page (it probably defaults to this anyway)

3. On the right pick up the box named ‘TL Box -> Horizontal Opt In Form’

4. Shift + Drag it on to the page template. I just threw it in to the ‘Content’ container above the main content block.

5. Save template (big green button in top right).

6. Click Back in your browser to go back to WordPress

7. Thesis > Skin Content

8. ‘TL Box -> Horizontal Opt In Form’ should be there. Click on it

9. click the +/- buttons to expand the sections and fill in labelling. I ticked the option ‘HTML Code Form’, and in the big textarea/memo box pasted in this code:

<form class="thesis_email_form opt-bar" action="http://your.php.list.server.com/?p=subscribe" method="post">
<div style="display: none;">
<input type="hidden" name="list[4]" value="signup" />
<input type="hidden" name="htmlemail" value="1" />
<input type="hidden" name="listname[4]" value="Your Newsletter List Name" />
<input type="hidden" name="VerificationCodeX" value="" />
<input type="hidden" name="subscribe" value="subscribe" />
<textarea name="nsu_robocop"></textarea>
</div>
<input class="home-form thesis_email_form_email input_text" id="fld_email" type="email" name="email" placeholder="Enter Your Email" required /><input type="submit" id="nsu-submit-0" class="home-form thesis_email_form_submit tl-button input_submit" name="submit" value="Subscribe »" />
</form>

Obviously fill in your.php.list.server.com and “Your Newsletter Name”. I just have an email address field but if you want a name you can add that in as another input box.

How did I figure out this code? Most of it comes from inspecting the HTML of the PHPList signup form on your phplist server, and/or the wordpress plugin ‘Newsletter Sign-Up’ which helps build the form, then I inspect the HTML code that it produces. I have also modified the phplist side to do things like send you back to my main site (not the phplist site) when you sign up, but that’s a separate exercise.

Oh and the ID of my list on the PHPList side is 4, hence [4] appearing there. You will probably need to modify this as well.

10. Finally some custom css. Thomas helped clean this up for me, thank you:

Thesis > Custom CSS and paste this in:

input.thesis_email_form_email.home-form {
    width: 61.75%;
}
input.thesis_email_form_submit.home-form {
    width: 36.25%;
}

 

Whew! It actually isn’t that hard if you know a bit of HTML. You could adapt this idea to pretty much any http based newsletter signup.

Paul.

 

 

 

 

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