Subscription form - Joomla

You created some contact lists and are ready to create and send awesome newsletters? Well first you'll have to give your users a way to subscribe to your contact lists!

The best way to do it is to show a subscription form somewhere on your website, and lucky for you we created one in the modules section of your site ;)

If the form doesn't work while using the Modules Anywhere extension, try changing the "Load javascript module" option in the "Advanced" tab.

Create the subscription form

If this is the first subscription form you create, you should find an already existing module named "AcyMailing subscription form" on the modules listing page, just edit it and go to the next step:

If you want to create an additional subscription form, click on the "New" button, then select the "AcyMailing subscription form" module type, you will end up on the edition page of your newly created subscription form.

Configure the form

Global settings

Global settings

• Display mode:

  • If you select "Tableless", AcyMailing will use <div> elements to display your fields so you can customize them the way you want via CSS

  • If you select "horizontal", the fields will be displayed horizontally, can be used in a footer for example

  • If you select "vertical", the fields will be vertically aligned

• Automatically subscribe to: The selected lists will be added on the form but they will be hidden, which means the user will be automatically subscribed to those lists if he clicks the subscribe button

  Please do not select the same lists for the visible lists and this field, it has no interest. If you do so, the lists won't be visible.

• Displayed lists: The selected lists will be displayed as visible on the form

• Lists checked by default: The selected lists will be checked by default, if they are shown on the form.

  Some countries do not allow you to check lists by default if it isn't for "non-profit". This option will let you easily check some lists and not others in order to stay compliant with your local rules.

• Display the lists: Choose if you want to show the lists before or after the fields

• Fields to display: You can select the fields you want to display on your form. If you use AcyMailing Enterprise, you will be able to create additional fields and select them the same way.

• Display text mode: Choose if you rather want the text "Name" and "Email" to be inside the Name and Email fields or outside. It will act on all AcyMailing fields

• Subscribe button text: By default, the text "Subscribe" will be shown on the subscription button that submits the form. But you can display any text on it.

  You can even use the value "ACYM_MY_SUBSCRIBE_BUTTON_TEXT", then go in the AcyMailing configuration tab "Languages", edit the language files then add your new translation key. It's not that easy to do and requires some steps, but at least you can do it if you need ;)

• Subscribe button text for logged in users: Exactly the same option as the previous one, except that this text will only be used for the subscribe button if the current user is logged in on your website

• Terms and conditions: You can select a Joomla article with this option, it will be shown at the bottom of the form (in a popup or a link) and the user won't be able to submit the form if he doesn't tick the checkbox

• Privacy policy: Same option as the previous one, useful if you want to have two separate articles for terms&conditions and privacy policy

• Display the article(s) in a popup: the previous two options will show an article, choose if you want them to be displayed in a popup when the users click on them, or in a new browser tab

Advanced settings

Advanced settings

• Unsubscribe button: If this option is activated, an unsubscribe button will be shown on the form if the user is logged in and is subscribed. When selecting "Always", the button will be shown if the option "Allow subscriber data modifications without authentication" isn't set to "No"

• Unsubscribe button text: Text displayed on the unsubscribe button. Just like the subscribe button, you can use a translation key here

• Success message: Choose the way to display the success message after subscription. You can:

  • replace the form

  • replace the form for a few seconds and display the form again

  • display the message above the form for a few seconds then hide the message

  • reload the page displaying the message in the template message area

• Redirection after unsubscription: If an URL is specified, the user will be redirected to this page after being unsubscribed. Note that you can use an external URL

• Redirect link: If an URL is specified, the user will be redirected to this page after being subscribed

• Intro text: The text you write in this option will be displayed just before the subscription form

• Post text: The text you write in this option will be displayed just after the subscription form

• Display user information if logged in: If the user is logged in, the lists he is already subscribed to will be checked by default, and the email (and all other fields) will be already filled in (so the user only has to click a button to subscribe instead of having to fill in the form)

• Form alignment: Align the fields contained in the form on the left, center or right

• Source: You can specify a "source" on which you'll be able to filter your AcyMailing users later (in the automations for example). Please don't use spaces or special characters for this option. Example: form_homepage_en

• Module class suffix: This option allows you to add a suffix on the CSS class applied on the form container, so you can fully customize the form using some CSS coding to match the styling of your site's template

• Form CSS class: This option allows you to add a CSS class directly on the form. You will then be able to customize the form using some CSS coding (but the title of the form won't be reachable through this class)

• Load javascript module: You can choose between two ways to load the needed scripts for the module, change this option if the form doesn't work properly (this can happen with Modules Anywhere for example)

Joomla also adds its own options to our module:

• Module tag: HTML tag used on the container of the module

• Bootstrap size: Width of the module, could be useful on some site templates

• Header tag: HTML tag used to contain the title of the module, can be useful to change it if your site template has a different styling

• Header class: CSS class added on the title of the module

• Module style: You can use the styling of an other template with this option, if you have more than one

Additional settings

Additional settings

Allowing the visitors of your website to subscribe to your newsletters is cool, but what if some bots tried to submit the form a million times, just for fun?

Worry not, you will find some very useful options in the AcyMailing configuration page, tab "Security" for cases like this one. I will let you discover them on the documentation page dedicated to the configuration :)

Activate your form

Once you created and configured your subscription form, you can show it to the users / visitors of your site:

• If you have a multilingual website, you can assign the form to a specific language thanks to the "Language" option. This way you may have two subscription forms that subscribe to two separate AcyMailing contact lists, "EN users" and "DE users" for example

• In the "Menu assignment" tab, choose on which page the form should be displayed

  Select the "position" on which the form should be placed (in the footer, a left or right menu for example)

• And of course, set its status to "Published"

If you don't have a testing / pre-production website, we recommend to set the "Access" option to Administrator or Super user depending on your own user group. Before publishing the form, or even while configuring it.

If you do this, you will be the only one to see it, and will be able to adjust some settings to make it display the way you prefer.