Fred Chapman

Hi Vladimir,

Thanks for your speedy and helpful reply! I disabled the custom formatting in the settings tab, and that solved the problem completely. I’m really looking forward to trying out your plugin on my website.

I’ve noticed that you do a great job of maintaining this plugin and responding rapidly to bug reports. Thanks again for all your hard work!

Fred

Nate,

I want you to know how much I appreciate your speedy and helpful technical support. I’m integrating MailChimp into my client’s website, and it makes all the difference to know that your company is serious about supporting its products and services. The high level of support you’ve provided inspires real confidence. I know I can count on you, and that’s why I plan to recommend MailChimp enthusiastically to all my clients!

Please forward this message to your supervisor. You deserve credit for a job well done!

Fred

mc_nate,

Thanks very much for your prompt and helpful reply! I followed both of your suggestions to get the embedded form working better:

1. I disabled JavaScript, and now the form opens a new web page with a confirmation message. This makes me really appreciate the plugin’s way of displaying a confirmation message within the form itself (a very nice feature), but any confirmation is much better than no confirmation at all!
2. I modified the style.css file for my theme. Instead of using a PNG image for the bullets in unordered lists in the sidebar, I changed it to use the default disc bullet, and now the embedded form displays only check boxes with no bullets underneath. Yes, this changes the bullets for all unordered lists in the sidebar, but I never liked those stupid PNG bullets anyway. ??

With your two suggestions, the embedded form is now a very reasonable workaround and will serve us well until the WordPress plugin is fixed.

Thanks again!

Fred

P.S. MailChimp ROCKS!!!

Prioritizing the Bug Fixes: I’ve spoken with my web project client, and we agree that we can make do without the choice of email format (plugin bug #1) or multiple fields of interest groups (plugin bug #3). What we need most is for the plugin to handle selected interest groups correctly. Could you please fix plugin bug #2 first, before you spend a lot of time fixing the other two plugin bugs?

That would help us a lot!

Thanks so much,

Fred Chapman
[ Signature moderated. ]

P.S. The embedded code needs some work too, but that’s not a priority for us. We’d much rather go back to using the plugin!

Follow Up: I’ve tested the embedded code generated by MailChimp.com, and it addresses the bugs I reported in the WordPress plugin. Unfortunately, the embedded code has a couple of problems of its own:

1. There is absolutely no confirmation of any kind after clicking on the Subscribe button!
2. The check boxes and radio buttons do not completely cover the list bullets, which looks unprofessional.

Can you folks at MailChimp please provide one solution which does everything I need, all at the same time?

Thank you.

but I cannot delete!

mc_nate, thanks for your reply! I’m glad to know you’re already aware of the problem and are working on a fix.

This particular problem isn’t terribly serious for me, but I have encountered two other problems which are deal-breakers. I’ll have to stop using this plugin in the mean time. I’ll start a new thread with the details.

Thanks again,

Fred

P.P.S. I’ve found too many bugs in this plugin and will have to switch to embedded code to get the features I need to work reliably.

P.S. Clarification: MailChimp uses the word “groups” in two different ways, so I need to be more precise here!

MailChimp lets you set up groups of interest groups. I had set up a list with two groups (fields) of interest groups (checkbox options) as follows:

Monthly Mailings:

– Newsletter

Instant Updates:

– Announcements
– Training Events
– Free Technical Tips
– Contests & Discounts

The plugin loaded only the Newsletter interest group from Monthly Mailings. It did not load other four interest groups from Instant Updates.

As a workaround, I deleted the Monthly Mailings field completely along with the Newsletter option. Now the plugins loads the four options from the Instant Updates field just fine.

P.S. On further reflection, this is really a bug report, not a feature request! The plugin should include all the same fields that a standard web-based form has.

Thanks for acknowledging me in the changelog — that was a mighty nice thing to do!

I just upgraded to Version 1.1. That new column sort feature is really nice. Thanks for adding that!

Fred

That’s a great idea! I’d like to see that feature too.

Fred Chapman

Hi Mike,

I just started using your contact form, and it’s great — lots of features, powerful, customizable, and yet easy to use. I gave it a five-star rating on www.ads-software.com. Thanks for all your hard work!

I had issues with the autoresponder at first, but then I discovered that the email service which was supposed to receive the autoresponder message was using clamav.net to filter out my my hosting provider InMotionHosting.com as a possible source of spam. If I send the autoresponder message to Gmail instead, it gets through.

I have a suggestion for others who are having autoresponder issues: If you use real From and Reply-To addresses in the autoresponder settings, you will at least get bounce messages notifying you that the recipient’s email service thinks your site’s autoresponse may be spam. That way, if there’s a problem, at least you’ll find out about it!

Best wishes,

Fred Chapman

Greetings rsstevelex! Glad you were able to install a patched version of the plugin. I feel your pain about not being able to find the Revisions Meta Box. I had the same problem finding something else once, and it was very frustrating until I found the answer on a forum: Go to the top of the Edit Page/Post screen and click on the Screen Options tab. Now click on the Post Revisions box. Close the Screen Options and go down to the bottom of the Edit screen. You’ll see the Revisions Meta Box there.

Welcome to the WordPress “So where did they hide this feature???” Club! ??

Fred

Cameron,

Thanks for your suggestion — I haven’t tried using prettyPhoto. I’m currently using Shadowbox together with Portfolio Slideshow. Shadowbox does a good job of resizing the images automatically. You can see a demo by going to this page:

https://www.santlytraining.com/seminars/

By default, the slideshow is embedded in the page using Portfolio Slideshow. If you click on an image, it’s enlarged and resized using Shadowbox.

Like I said, I really like the look of your slideshow, but the plugin isn’t behaving on the site I’m building. Has anyone else had similar problems?

Fred