I need to add to a site created in Bricks the ability to register for a newsletter (via email address) that would send notification of new posts on the site to people who would register for the newsletter.
I’ve been looking for this for two days and can’t find anything that works. How do I make it work?
This isn’t really a bricks thing, it’s a WP thing:
You can use the built in ‘subscriber’ options in WP… or you will need a plugin like mailpoet, or get mailchimp, activecampaign or similar CRM.
Please read this thread about MailPoet:
And thanks for link, I will try this way.
Constant Contact is paid, drop out.
I need a free solution, the site is completely non-commercial, it’s a poet’s blog.
Besides, I don’t need a mass of unnecessary features and an external service to send mailings. I have an SMTP account and the emails will be dozens per day.
I need a trivial thing:
- register an e-mail address
- send information about a new post to it.
That’s all.
Why are there NO SIMPLE TOOLS FOR THIS?
They are either expensive and subscription-based, or powerfully complex and elaborate, for marketing, for CRM and hundreds of other things. To me, it’s unnecessary.
You can either: create a form, save the form entries/emails to a WP Option field, or a CPT. Create a cron-job to call a mailer. Write a mailer function to get the emails, get the recent posts, format them into a message and send… which when you break it down is far from simple… or use one of many free solutions.
If you can code it, no problem. If you cannot, you accept what is available.
https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/search/newsletter/
Mailpoet, icegram, sendinblue, activecampaign and others have a free tier. But given the actual complexity behind the ‘simple task’ - it makes sense for devs to create plugins which can handle more - and users to not use what they don’t need.
It is strange that Wordpress still lacks some incredibly basic features… but it is also still free if you use the .org version… win some, lose some.
You are absolutely right, I use free plug-ins and take it with what they offer or write my own. The problem, however, is that in order to take a plugin you have to spend a ton of time testing and trying both free and paid plugins - and the documentation, even of commercial plugins, rarely answers the questions. You install various plug-ins one by one and eventually find that this is not the one. Another one, also not, etc. And everyone goes through this. And while some specific and unique needs justify it, a common and obvious thing, occurring on 95% of sites, could nevertheless be handled somehow globally. Such an obvious solution is a newsletter.
So, in order not to just complain I will share the results, the most sensible so far seems to me to be the Icegram Express plugin, it too has a lot of redundant features, but it is relatively simple and easy to use with Bricks Builder. MailPoet, on the other hand, which is often recommended, can’t be used with Bricks Builder, it doesn’t have a shortcode and can’t be embedded in a page created in BB. And the craziest effect is that it adds 40 (sic!) of its tables in the database and does not remove them after uninstallation, a nightmare.
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