Exclusive Preview of WP Email Capture Premium

One of the benefits of being super awesome cool like me is the things I get to see and do before everyone else. Today I am playing with (cough.. ‘testing’) WP Email Capture Premium before it’s official launch.

WP Email Capture is an e-mail subscription plugin for WordPress. Install it, activate, and watch as the masses add their e-mail address to your marketing list. Or just your mum, whatever. We can’t all have thousands of fans.

The plugin, rated 4 out of 5 on wordpress.org, is CAN-SPAM compliant, works in a widget or post or page and exports to CSV ready for import into your e-mailing software of choice. And if that isn’t cool enough for you, WP Email Capture Premium has extra good stuff, like the ability to build and maintain multiple e-mail subscription lists:

Ideal if you want to maintain more than one mailing list, e.g. a “thought of the day” or “special offers” as well as a monthly newsletter.

Or, perhaps you want to take out the middle-man altogether, and have WordPress & WP Email Capture Premium integrate directly into an e-mail suite such as MailChimp? It can do that too using the Add / Edit External List feature:

And, perhaps the feature that I’m most stoked about because of it’s potential to boost the effectiveness of newsletter sign-ups by telling the webmaster what’s working, where referrals are coming from, landing page hits and tracking conversions: the stats centre. Filter stats by date, by individual list or look at the whole picture… it’s a data whore’s wet dream!

If you’re interested in getting your grubby hands on a copy of WP Email Capture Premium, register your interest at the official plugin site to be notified of the details of release.

Starting from Scratch – 3 Must Have Plugins

When I set up a new WordPress blog or website, which can be several times a week these days, there’s a short list of must have settings to configure, tweaks to make and plugins to install. Below are my top 3 ‘must have’ plugins for every WordPress install.

WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk

Although I think the out of the box Google-friendliness of WP is one of the great reasons to use it, the WordPress SEO plugin by Joost de Valk (aka Yoast) offers a huge range of excellent add-on features that naturally complement what WordPress offers.

The plugin is well documented both in the settings pages and on the official site, allowing even the most SEO-phobic webmaster to take advantage of Yoast’s experience with search engine optimisation to push their site ahead in the search engines.

Contact Form 7 by Takayuki Miyoshi

There are tons of contact form / form creator plugins available for WordPress, but Contact Form 7 is my go-to contact solution. The small feature set appeals to my minimalist, efficient side without compromising on the important things you need within a mail form. Importantly, it’s easy enough for anyone to generate the form they require without tinkering with code.

Google Analyticator by Ronald Heft

If you’re not running some sort of analytics on your website, you’re doing it wrong! My analytics package of choice is Google Analytics, and what better way to link it into your WordPress site than with a plugin that shows a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches all on your dashboard? Google Analyticator does all that and more.


Are you a WordPress developer, and think your plugin deserves to be featured in a post like this? Contact me about a plugin review.