Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/all/20050727085706/http://www.interspire.com:80/whitepapers/index.php?pageName=How_to_Insert_a_SendStudio_subscription_form_into_ArticleLive
I distinctively remember receiving my copy of ArticleLive sometime last November. I sure was thrilled with finally getting a chance to build my very own article site, with high hopes of bringing in more visitors (back then I had a pathetic visitorship of around 100 unique per month), I set out on a journey to get my site going.
With ArticleLive installed rather painlessly on my web server, I added a few articles, made some simple template modifications, and WALA! I was done. Yea...so I thought.
I needed a strategy to connect with my visitors and that's where SendStudio came into the picture. I was faced with the seemingly rough task of setting up a newsletter subscription form and on top of that, it had to be integrated into my ArticleLive site. I must confess, I'm no techie guy and PHP is so not my cup of tea.
How in the world was I going to do it!?
Well, as you would've guessed. I got around it and it was crazily simple! You have probably asked the same question before and whether or not you're already done creating one, let this be a reference point to those desperately seeking some invaluable help and to those who are just as proficient in PHP as I am.
What will I learn?
This document will teach you how to integrate a SendStudio Newsletter subscription form into your ArticleLive site. It is a step-by-step guide from start to finish, but we won't be creating a subscription form from scratch...you'll need to do that first via SendStudio. Note that this article assumes that you've got access to both SendStudio and ArticleLive.
I've got ArticleLive, but no SendStudio
Not a problem. Just apply the same steps if you have some other mailing list script.
Start below from "Create a New Content Page in ArticleLive".
View of the finished product
Here's what the finished product will look like. Notice how well the subscription form fits into the page and the overall site design. It collects the subscriber's first name, email address and preferred format.
Getting Started
First, we'll start with a getting a simple subscription form. I've kept it basic on purpose so that you can easily modify or add to it if the need arises. What you'll have to do first is retrieve the HTML code using SendStudio. If you're not sure how to, just login to your SendStudio Admin.
Click on Manage Forms >> Get HTML >> Select all the code, Right click and Copy.
Here we have a sample of a built form: (don't try to use this one as these forms are unique to each sendstudio installation and mailing list)
We need to create a new page in ArticleLive to hold our newsletter subscription form.
Login to your ArticleLive Control Panel and create a new page. Pages >> Create New Page
We'll call it 'Newsletter Subscription Form' but you are welcome to name it whatever you like.
Now, paste the subscription code for your form from SendStudio(Manage Forms >> Get HTML) into your ArticleLive content page.
When viewing the manage page, in the editor, switch to the source code mode first and paste the code into it. Then switch back to Edit mode. You should now see a form there.
Remove heading and styles for this form
Removing the heading: If you notice in the visual layout mode of the editor, it now has a heading for this form table row called "Newsletter Subscription". To prevent 2 titles from appearing on the main page, we'll need to remove the heading of the subscription form.
Switch to source code mode and remove the following code: <TR>
<TD colSpan=2 height=20>
<P class=heading>Newsletter Subscription</P></TD></TR>
This will remove the heading, the cell and the row that it is contained in.
Removing Styles: The code that comes straight from Sendstudio includes styles that may affect your own site styles in the ArticleLive template design. So we need to remove these styles. I've experienced times when the font size of my subscription page changed due to the Style tags within the form. Best that you remove it so that it conforms to the main Styles.css design built into ArticleLive.
Get into Source mode and select all the text from <style> to </style> as shown in the sample below and delete it. <style>
td, body, select, textarea, input {
font-family: verdana;
font-size: 8pt;
}
p {
font-family: verdana;
font-size: 8pt;
margin: 7;
}
.required {
color: red;
font-weight: bold;
}
.heading {
font-size: 10pt;
font-weight: bold;
color: ;
}
</style>
You're Done!
Yep, you heard me right. That's all to it. Congrats on making it this far. Now save the page and preview it on your site. Looks pretty neat doesn't it?
Conclusion
Overall, ArticleLive is a superb product. Customisations takes some getting used to, but once you're familiar, it's a breeze. Look into the Panels folder, play around with the CSS, create some custom panels, just explore. In future newsletters, we hope to have more of such articles… from the basics to advanced stuff. If you've got any suggestions or a “things you'll like to know how to do” list, feel free to post it in the forums and we might just come up with a tutorial for it.
Thanks for your time… it's been a pleasure serving you. Till we meet again!
About the Author
Amit Bhatia is one of Interspire's product specialists. His experience with both PHP and our products is exceptional and he has fantastic customer service experience.
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