Use the newsletter plugin with our themes

Many of our themes have built in newsletter forms, tied to MailChimp, if you are a MailChimp user you can have a look at this post for information on how to set up your theme with the service.

If for some reason you don’t want to use MailChimp and want to handle newsletter subscriptions locally, you can do that using the Newsletter plugin, lets see how we can connect it to a theme.

Start by installing and activating the plugin.

By default the newsletter subscription plugin only requires an email from the user. Most of our themes also only require an email to subscribe. In this case all you have to do to connect the plugin with the theme’s form is go to Appearance > CSSIgniter Settings > Newsletter Options and set up the fields as displayed below:

replace the placeholder URL in the Action URL box with your site’s URL and append /?na=s at the end, as displayed, add ne in the “Email” field name box and leave everything else empty and save. Place the theme’s newsletter widget (if applicable) in any sidebar and you are done.

Some themes, like BusinessTwo for example, require a name along with the email for the subscription to go through. In this case you need to go to Newsletter > List Building > Subscription Form Fields and set the Name or First Name option to be displayed even on subscription forms as displayed below.

Then you go back to Appearance > CSSIgniter Settings > Newsletter Options and fill in the fields as displayed below

save and again add the theme’s newsletter widget (if applicable) to any sidebar you like.

After connecting the theme’s newsletter form with the plugin you will need to setup the plugin in order to manage your subscriptions properly, it’s a quite advanced plugin so you might want to have a look at its documentation here.