I'm very happy to announce that I've just released a Wysija extension for Ninja Forms! If you haven't heard of Wysija before make sure to check them out – they're an awesome newsletter service that you can manage through your own WordPress site. Now, with this extension you can allow users to automatically subscribe to your Wysija lists when they fill out a form on your website.
Why I Decided to Develop an Extension for Wysija
In addition to the pure simple joy of developing a plugin (more on that in a future post) I've been meaning to look into Wysija for a while now. I've seen them mentioned around the WordPress world and we actually recommend them at WooThemes so it only makes sense to really dig into it.
From a developers point of view Wysija uses standard WordPress programming techniques in their plugin which makes extending it very easy to do. This is perhaps the biggest differentiator & their greatest strength compared to other hosted newsletter services like Constant Contact & MailChimp where you have no access to the code. If you have a client with specific needs then set them up with Wysija. If they want to track who actually opens the email and send them a coupon that's entirely possible. With a little programming you could even connect this with an e-commerce solution like WooCommerce to send them a unique coupon code. Good luck trying to set that up with a hosted solution! This is a really simple example – you could make it as infinitely custom as you want.
Knowing that all of this power is possible with Wysija made me really want to make it even more awesome so I created this extension to easily add users to one of yours lists so you have less to worry about. You just create a Ninja Forms form and add an opt in field for the user. Now you can spend your time making Wysija & your WordPress site more awesome! 🙂
What I did a Little Differently with this Extension
I was a little surprised with the default way to integrate a Ninja Forms form with a newsletter service. The default way doesn't create any fields to let the user know that they're subscribing to a newsletter and instead relies on the service's double-opt-in feature (if the service has one). This doesn't sound terrible from a website owner's standpoint but when thinking about it from a user's stand point I was a little disappointed. As a user if I ever saw a “Are you Sure You Want to Subscribe to This Newsletter” subject line in my email without explicitly opting in I would immediately lose trust in that brand.
With some motivation to change this I went to the drawing board and created an opt-in/opt-out field that users can use to choose if they want to subscribe to the list. I've shared this UX change with the developers and as Ninja Forms grows hopefully we'll see more UX improvements like this become the default.
I added an extra form field type which allows users to choose a list, gives the admin to use opt-in / opt-out fields, and allows the admin to label the signup field however they want.
This is what the completed Wysija signup form looks like.
From Start to Send
I hope you're excited to try out Wysija. It's a really awesome plugin and can take your newsletter service to the next level. If you do like it you can make your life a little easier by getting this extension to make it easy for your users to sign up for yours lists.