simpleContact blog » Tutorials

Screencast – how to install simpleContact Lite

Alex — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 10:57:56 +0000

I’ve been talking about screencasts for a little while, but the time wasn’t right to make one because I needed to get my applications updated for the new website look and feel. With the release of simpleContact Lite 1.21, I can start with the free version.

Here’s a video that walks through the installing simpleContact Lite. Hopefully it clarifies the process for you. It’s only about two minutes long, but believe me it took longer than that to make!

In case you’re curious, I used ScreenFlow for the Mac to record and edit this video. It’s a well designed, powerful tool and well worth the price – I highly recommend it. The text editor I used was TextMate and the FTP client was Transmit.

The music is called Green and Gorgeous and is available from AudioJungle.

I’ll be adding more screencasts to the YouTube channel over the next few months. Stay tuned!

How to integrate simpleContact Pro contact form with a WordPress page

Alex — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:08:01 +0000

I enjoy hearing about unexpected ways in which people are using my applications. This is one of the best yet!

Both simpleContact Pro and Lite play nice with the popular blogging platform WordPress. They’re PHP/MySQL based so they can be hosted on the same website, even sharing a database. As a matter of fact they’re both installed on this website…

If you’ve installed WordPress you’ll find that the process with SCP is familiar (which is no coincidence). However, SCP is not a WordPress plugin. It’s a separate and self-contained application. This means that some people might prefer it to be more integrated with their blog that it currently is.

Enter Stephen Meehan of d3creative, a talented designer and personal friend of mine. He’s wrote a tutorial on his blog explaining how to add the simpleContact Pro contact form to a WordPress page template. It involves a bit of copying and pasting, but there’s nothing to intimidate someone who’s used to bending WordPress to their will.

Let me know what you think! I’m tempted to record a screencast video to describe this process…

Campaign Monitor support for double opt-in mailing list in simpleContact Pro

Alex — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:07:39 +0000

I’ll be using this blog to surface things that are going on around this site, such as on the forums. If an issue or some information seems particularly relevant I’ll bring it up here. Which brings me onto the subject of hacks.

Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) said…

“I believe that there aren’t any more ‘killer features’ in software, there are 10,000 killer features and everyone has a different 20.”

He may have a point there! That’s why, since the original release of simpleContact Pro, I’ve been busy writing “hacks” – walkthroughs for adding functionality that isn’t currently present in SCP but might be just the thing you need. These are posted to the support forums.

The latest post could be considered an early pass at building in support for the popular email newsletter system Campaign Monitor. I often recommend Campaign Monitor for sending emails to a mailing list – it has a comprehensive feature-set, great design and the cost of sending a campaign (even to thousands of subscribers) is trivially low.

SCP 2.0 includes a CSV export feature that makes it easy to output your mailing list, ready to import into Campaign Monitor.

It could be easier though. It could be seamless.

This new hack uses the Campaign Monitor API so that when a user confirms their mailing list subscription, they automagically appear in your list inside Campaign Monitor.

Check out the Campaign Monitor support for double opt-in mailing list hack. I’d love to hear your feedback on it – you can help guide a built-in implementation for a future version of simpleContact Pro.