James has just published OM4′s WordPress Aweber Integration plugin to the WordPress plugins directory. He’s gone off to the MCG to see Australia try and win a cricket game (we wish), and I’m left to do the introductory post.

Aweber is an email list manager that lets you manage your email newsletters as well as email marketing campaigns (that is our affiliate link if you are in the market for an email manager).

Aweber Subscription Widget in Sidebar

The Aweber Integration plugin is designed to simplify the process of adding one or more Aweber email signup forms to your sidebar.

There are a few reasons this may help you.

Firstly, if you are using WordPress MU (WPMU) and try to copy/paste the HTML snippet, the code will be filtered. With this plugin, you can easily use Aweber forms in WordPress MU (we have been using it on OM4 clusters for some time).

Secondly, even if you can copy/paste HTML, unless you are comfortable with hacking HTML it can be a real hassle to change it. So we have configuration options (see image below) to let you define:

• a message above or below the email fields to help explain what the subscription is for
• the text on the button (Subscribe or Send or Join!)
• the landing page after registration with Aweber

Aweber Email Analytics Integration

Finally, we’ve recently added a configuration option (under Settings) that lets you switch on the Aweber Email Analytics functionality. This places the analytics tracking code on each page of your website (note you still need to complete a final configuration step in Aweber before it starts working).

Hope it makes using Aweber in your WordPress website a lot more convenient, please let us know how it works out for you.

AWeber Widget Configuration

WordPress Plugin: Aweber Integration from OM4