Most of our clients has such kind of designs where they have more than one field to let their users subscribe to their website. After getting common requirements I thought it would be better to write my own plugin where our client can easily find what they want from a subscribe form. Thus ‘Navayan Subscribe‘ wordpress plugin took birth!

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FEATURES:

  1. Double opt-in Subscribe and UnSubscribe
  2. Default form field – Email
  3. Extended form fields – Name and Custom field
  4. Custom form heading, field labels
  5. Custom Email Templates
  6. Custom Error/Success/Information messages
  7. Option to hide form after success
  8. Send new subscriber notification to admin
  9. Send new post notification to subscribers
  10. Featured image in post notification
  11. Sidebar Widget
  12. Display Subscribe form on Subscribe page
  13. Option to send post content in email
  14. Translate text support
  15. User gets removed if UnSubscribed
  16. Checks whether user is logged in or not
  17. jQuery form validation
  18. HTML5 Placeholder
  19. HTML5 Validation with jQuery fallback
  20. Displays various users count
  21. Show Subscribers count – Optional
  22. Works with Custom Post Types too
  23. Spam protection – Restricts specific IPs, Domains, Emails with custom messages
  24. Active theme CSS for email templates

The subscribe form is only visible to non-logged user! So try logging out (if you are logged in as an admin or so) to see the form!

What Navayan Subscribe does?

‘Navayan Subscribe’ allows your visitors to easily and quickly subscribe to your website with double opt-in process, custom email templates, post/page notifications, spam protection. Can be used as a sidebar widget.

The additional field could be any field that you want to introduce to your users. It could be Company Name, Organization, Location, Occupation etc…

If you want to keep it simple then you don’t need to do anything. The plugin itself takes care of the simplicity. It will display the subscribe form with form heading, email field and subscribe button.

Installation and Usage

Simply download the plugin, activate it. After activation go to Dashboard -> Tools -> Navayan Subscribe

You can use subscribe form as a sidebar widget. Go to Dashboard -> Appearance -> Widgets OR use it in Subscribe page

I have set the basic UI for subscribe form. If you want to change it’s UI (width, font, color etc.) then you need to overwrite the CSS properties with !important method in your style.css. For example:

#ny_subscribe_wrapper label { width: 100px !important}
#ny_subscribe_wrapper input[type='text'] { width: 120px !important}

Extending Navayan Subscribe form

If you would like to ask your users their name then it is also possible with this plugin. You can also add additional form field as mentioned above.

Follow these steps and you are done!

  • Go to your Dashboard -> Tools -> Navayan Subscribe
  • Type label for Name and/or Custom fields
  • Provide error/success messages
  • Save the settings

Navayan Subscribe form settings

You will then see the subscribe form in extended mode for the users.

You can also specify the error and success messages, form heading, submit button label text and more. So that it will be more relevant to your website/blog.

Admin can add subscribers

Due to double opt-in process (its mandatory in most of the countries), this feature has been removed since v1.10.

Custom Email Templates

Navayan Subscribe provides easy to customize email templates for post/page notifications, subscribe and unsubscribe confirmation, which will be send to your website/blog users/subscribers. The email templates has the basic structure, which I think, is sufficient in subscribe notification or in confirmation emails. If you want to put your own words / sentences, go ahead and structure the email templates as you like! Use the given keywords in this email templates. The keywords are self-explanatory. You can use HTML tags with inline CSS style to beautify the emails!

Navayan Subscribe - Custom email templates

Double opt-in process

The double opt-in feature has been introduced since v1.10.

  • It focuses onto user’s independence and confirmation whether he/she wants to subscribe or not for site updates.
  • If user confirmed to subscribe, then user will receive an updates from the site.
  • If user dis-like or not interested, then user can un-subscribe.
  • After successful un-subscribe, user gets removed from the system and will not receive any updates from the site.

Navayan Subscribe - subscribe confirmation email

An article onto MailChimp will help you to understand double opt-in process in details.

Subscriber’s Inbox

As you set your email templates in settings, your website subscribers will get the same structure in their email inbox. I have tested it with Gmail and Yahoomail. Following screenshot is the minimal output of the email template of post/page notification. The email body has the excerpt text. Its up to you whether to send full content or excerpt.

Navayan Subscribe - post/page notification email

Notification email to admin

You can set whether to get notification of every successful subscription. If selected, the notification will be delivered to site admin.

Currently the email contains following message structure:

  1. Subject
  2. Name (if it has)
  3. Email
  4. Custom field (if it has)
  5. Date

All email templates are in HTML format with HTML5 markup! Also there is an option to use your active theme’s CSS for emails that are being sent!

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UnSubscribe

The unsubscribe form is also customizable in plugin’s settings. It checks the user’s email and sends the un-subscribe confirmation email to subscriber. If subscriber confirms his/her un-subscription by clicking on un-subscribe link in received email,  subscriber gets removed completely from the system.

Spam Prevention!

There was a good amount of request to add spam protection. Thus its included in v1.13. You can make a list of IP addresses (both REMOTE and SERVER), Domain names, Emails that you would like to mark as SPAM for your website/blog. Plugin will not allow any interfere for black listed IP/Domain/Email. Less stress on your Database and Server!

Spam Protection

Common Questions

Q1. How to change the UI of Navayan Subscribe form?
– You can use either Navayan Subscribe form style or default style of your wordpress theme.
– Edit your style.css file located in your themes folder. You will need to overwrite the properties ie. #ny_subscribe_wrapper label { width: 100px !important}

Q2. Does admin receives email for each successful subscription?
– Yes. After user confirms his/her subscription, admin will receive an email.

Q3. Does subscribers receives email for every new post?
– Yes! As long as you select ‘Notify Subscribers’ checkbox during post save/update/publish actions.

Q4. Does notification have any delay?
– No. Notifications will be delivered as soon as the post get saved/updated/published. Pre-condition is ‘Notify Subscribers’ checkbox should be selected!

Q5. Does it have custom_post_type email notification?
– Yes! It works for custom post type as well 🙂

Q6. Is it multilingual?
– No. But it has the text translation support as provided by WordPress.

Q7. Can I use it in sidebar widget?
– Yes. Please go to Appearance -> Widgets and drag-drop ‘Navayan Subscribe’ widget to sidebar.

Q8. Does it sends post content in email?
– Yes. You can set the email template as you want. Copy-Paste the relevant keywords with curly braces and save the template.

Q9. Does it check whether the user is logged in or not?
– Yes. The form will be visible to non-logged in users only. So if you logged in as an admin or so, please log out to see the form! You can set a custom message for logged in user.

Q10. Does it have un-subscribe feature?
– Yes. Using double opt-in process since v1.10

Q11. Does it delete users if they un-subscribe?
– Yes. User’s all information gets deleted from the system after successful un-subscribe.

Q12. Can admin set custom Un-Subscribe message?
– Yes. The messages are customizable at plugin’s form settings.

Q13. How Un-Subscribe feature works?
– Plugin creates ‘UnSubscribe’ page (if not already created) with [ nys_UnSubscribePageContent ] shortcode in page content. So whenever your subscriber clicks on ‘UnSubscribe’ link in post notification email, it returns to your blog/website on ‘UnSubscribe’ page and asks the email. If the email is valid and exist in the system, it sends an un-subscribe confirmation email to user. If user clicks on the un-subscribe confirmation link, that user gets deleted from the system.

Q14. How to get rid off ‘Subscribe’ and ‘UnSubscribe’ pages from menu?
– If you are using ‘Page’ based menu then you will certainly sees ‘Subscribe’ and ‘UnSubscribe’ pages in a menu. Please don’t delete that pages as it requires for plugin to work properly. You have to go to ‘Appearance -> Menus‘ and create a top level menu with the pages/posts/categories/tags you want. Here you can exclude those pages from the menu list. Save the menu as primary top level menu (or use ‘wp_nav_menu()’ in header.php) and see the difference! Check How to create navigation menu? and wp_nav_menu for step by step instructions.

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Use Navayan CSV Export WP plugin to export the wordpress table data, users into CSV format.