Spread the WordPress Love – Subscribe2

How callous of me to reference the most excellent Subscribe2 plugin & widget without crediting its source!!! Although credit has to go to Matt for discovering this handy combo, once discovered, I had to have it for ChezArtz. Anybody who doesn’t have a WordPress blog (or plan to in the near future) can probably pretty much stop reading–or at least skip down a few paragraphs–right now, because I’m about to give you the step-by-step on getting this feature for your blog.

There are two pieces to this, a plugin and a widget. Now technically you can use the plugin without the widget, but then you have to create a page for the subscription form to live on, or put it inline like I did in the last post, and that’s just not as nifty as having right in your sidebar. So in addition to having the plugin, if you want the widget, you’ll have to enable sidebar widgets (if you’re a WordPress user and have no idea what I’m talking about, click here to get widget wise). Maybe it’s just late, but this seems like it’s getting complicated. OK, Tech Writer, put it in numbered steps:

1. Get the WordPress Widgets plugin, install it on your blog, and activate it in the Plugins tab of your WordPress Admin. [Editor's note: Hmm. Today I updated the version of WordPress I am using for this blog and now you don't have to do this step any more. I left it in just in case you, too, are on an older version, but it now comes with the standard download. Whoopeee!]
2. Get the Subscribe2 plugin, install it on your blog, and activate it in the Plugins tab of your WordPress Admin.
   Note: You can do some nifty things in the Manage | Subscribers tab like customizing the email templates for all the emails that go to your subscribers & unsubscribers and set it to auto-subscribe your registered users, etc. I won’t go into all the details here because the documentation in the ReadMe.txt on the plugin is pretty self-explanatory.
3. Get the Subscribe2 widget, install it on your blog, and activate it in the Plugins tab of your WordPress Admin.
4. Go to the Presentation tab, click Widgets, drag Subscribe2 onto your Sidebar list, and click Save Changes.

Again, thanks to the folks who design & support this great plugin & widget combo. You know they do it for free, right? I’ve been trying to purchase all my shareware & make donations to freeware organizations just because, well, I like to imagine that I’m helping to tear down the big baddies at Adobe and Microsoft who think it’s fun to charge $800 for software packages like Microsoft Office or Dreamweaver or PhotoShop when I can get a similar (in some cases better!) product like Neo Office or Gimp for free, or something like Rage Web Design for such a low cost that it makes it rather easy to live without Dreamweaver’s nifty but totally unnecessary (at least for $399) WYSIWYG editor.

Whew! Did you know I could take a simple little request for the link to the Subscribe2 widget and turn it into a diatribe against the shrink-wrap software dinosaur industry? Only at ChezArtz…