For about a year and a half I’ve been using a contact manager to manage subscriptions to three of my sites. It was cumbersome: because of the three lists, three subscription forms, three autoresponse series, it was confusing, and the user interface was quite poor. No matter how many times I checked the list, I kept getting notifications from one email address about a second website signup. And the email notifications didn’t tell me what they’d entered, so I had to login to get details. And it was a monthly fee.
So I started looking at alternative autoresponders/contact managers.
I dallied very briefly with getresponse.com. They had a nice free option for less than 100 subscribers, and it generated a simple one-line of text to add to the site. But I really wanted a comment box on the form, but the custom fields didn’t group nicely.
So I tried campaign monitor. We use it at work for lovely html email newsletters, but I was more interested in the autoresponder at first. But most important was customisation of the confirmation and thank you pages, and getting a comment box on the signup form.
I was too lazy to use the API. I just wanted a simple block of code to plonk onto the contact page of my Drupal-managed sites.
My first little regret was that the dropdown box for custom fields didn’t include one for textareas – just plain text fields.
And then the generated code didn’t perform any validation.
This page was absolutely necessary: http://help.campaignmonitor.com/topic.aspx?t=194 . I had to modify my Drupal page template to call the jQuery files, and then modify the generated code to turn the custom text field into a textarea, and refine the styling.
One of my goals had been to find a simple, cheap contact manager that I could show others how to use. As long as they don’t care about comment boxes and validation, it’s pretty simple.
Of course after I’d finished it, I found there was a Drupal module for the API – http://drupal.org/project/campaignmonitor.
But as each of the members on my site may want their own campaignmonitor form, just pasting the slightly modified code, was the best solution for me.
