Welcome to the Compass Designs website, powered by Joomla 1.5! The goal of this new site is to be the place to bookmark if you are looking for quality Joomla templates, tutorials, news and tips.In a previous post, Increase Your traffic with Professional Email Marketing, I briefly discussed how to leverage email marketing to increase the repeat traffic at your website.
To make this easier, Joomlashack has released a powerful Email Newsletter component for Joomla 1.5; we call it J!Contact.
J!Contact is a component that provides an alternative registration process for your Joomla site.
- Subscribe people registering to a list on iContact:
Exponentially build your traffic by bring registered users back to your site with iContact\'s powerful email marketing tools. - Collect first and last name on subscription:
Joomla just collects the name as a single field, but research shows that emails addressed to someone by their first name have a higher response rate.
To start with you should should get a free trial of iContact so you can test the features of this extension. Then simply install the component and alternative login module as normal.
J!Contact works only in Joomla 1.5 (native). J!Contact is a free, unencoded extension, but you are not allowed to re-distribute it.
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Comments (12)
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Ric Raftis
said:
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Far too light on pricing and detail Barrie to make a comparison against the likes of Aweber. Cheers, |
Administrator
said:
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@Ric, Its free  Remember, its a plugin from for Joomla, you have to go to iContact's site for the details of their service. Pricing is there too. |
Marte
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This is very confusing. How con something be free and have a pricing. You are talking about a free trial period and then you have to buy the extension later? What is rally free and what does one have to pay for? |
Administrator
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Sorry for the confusion : iContact is a hosted email marketing service. I have no connection to it except I think its great and use it myself. It has a monthly fee. J!Contact is an extension we created to allow your Joomla site to integrate really well with iContact. We basically made it for ourself and are giving it away for free. I hope that helps! |
Steph
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Hi, Just installed J!Contact and activated the login module. But when I click 'Create account' (ie try to register a new user) on this link: http://[my localhost]/index.php?option=com_jcontact&view=register I get an error: Parse error: parse error, expecting `')'' in c:program files [my localhost]componentscom_jcontactincludesdomxml-php4-to-php5.php on line 43 Any ideas what's causing that? |
NickD
said:
| Sorry, but I'm still a bit confused about this. Is J!Contact of any use on its own, or do we have to pay for an iContact (really confusing choice of names there!) subscription for it to do anything? |
Administrator
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@Steph That sounds like you are missing a php module @Nick iContact is a the email application you must pay for. J!Contact is a free widget/component to integrate iContact into Joomla. It won't do anything by itself. |
Steph
said:
Hi, me again...  Just done some checking about the error posted above... It appears the Include for the domxml-php4-to-php5.php breaks on PHP4 servers. You need to wrap the include call in an 'if' statement to check whether the server is running PHP5... (See docs http://alexandre.alapetite.net...php4-php5/). If it's a PHP4 server, you don't need the include. So need to include line: if (version_compare(PHP_VERSION,'5','>=')){ when you call the include file... (FYI:I'm running PHP 4.3.1) Also: In Controller.php a reference is made to JFactory::getDate() - this feature was included in J!1.5.2, anyone (like me!) testing with 1.5.1 will get a fatal error: The fix is to upgrade to latest stable release: J!1.5.3 Once I'd done both these fixes, the component installed OK. I'm still to fully test iCOntact integration, but if I have issues will post them here again... Hope that helps somebody else. Cheers, S |
Chris
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We use iContact, and jcontact sounds like a fabulous idea, however I need a bit of instruction. Is there any way to add firlds to the login form? Also, when I tried the default setup, did a test signup, no user was added to my list. Again, this is great...if I can figure it out. ps - what does the API key do? I received and filled in the required info, but what is it for? Thanks again! |
Administrator
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You can't add fields unfortunately. You need the secret API to make sure everything works properly. If your Joomla needs are modest, you have launched a Joomla service that will incorporate iContact at www.simplweb.com |
Chris
said:
| Thank you. Actually, it did work...turns out the verification email went to the spam folder (there was no subject in the email). So it looks like it will be fine after a bit of tinkering. |
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