Genesis eNews Extended Announced

Over on the StudioPress blog, you’ll read about Genesis 1.9 depreciating the native FeedBurner e-mail subscription widget and recommending Genesis eNews Extended.

I love StudioPress’ themes—they look great, have solid logical structure for customizing, and a great community surrounding the product.

Earlier this year, I ran into a problem. I wanted to use their stock themes in a couple of different places and loved the way their Subscription widgets fit into the theme. I use MailChimp—not Feedburner, the only supported option. The suggestion in the community forum was restyle in CSS, which is fine. I was helping a few different small groups get sites off the ground and restyling each of them was taking more time than I thought it should.

The end result: a Genesis eNews Extended plugin. The plugin is really simple. In addition to supporting FeedBurner (ver 0.1.3), the plugin works with virtually any mailing list service. MailChimp, FeedBlitz, Constant Contact, Aweber, and so on. You give it the info it needs and it outputs a form identical in markup to the native Genesis eNews widget—thus matching the subscribe fields in their theme demos.

Last week, the founder of StudioPress, Brian Gardner reached out to me and we discussed my plan for the widget and my willingness to help. In all honesty, I told him, I had been planning to ship it over to them as a core patch, but never got around to doing it. With their plan to focus more on the core product, suggesting the eNews Extended plugin made perfect sense.

If you’re dropping by here for the first time, welcome. Go ahead and try out the plugin. There’s a subscribe form on the right powered using it. While keeping the plugin lean, I hope to continue to make it more useful for the Genesis community. The plugin, actually, is framework-agnostic. You can use it anywhere on WordPress, but the biggest perk of the plugin for me was not having to worry about CSS on Genesis themes. If you have any thoughts, drop me a line.

A quick note regarding support. While I’ve been known to reply to an e-mail here and there about the plugin, please direct all support requests to the WordPress.org forum for the plugin. Over time, between the forums and the tutorials, most users will find the answers they need without having to wait on me. My wife and I are expecting a baby any day now, so I’ll be off the grid some very soon.

Thanks for the Genesis community for the support and I look forward to meeting more of y’all as you begin using the plugin.