I’m using Joomla with VirtueCart for a new business venture. One thing that Joomla couldn’t do out of the box for me was to easily integrate with AWeber.

(The site is not fully set up yet, so don’t expect much if you go looking at it.)

If you don’t know about AWeber, you haven’t done much online marketing. They’re the best autoresponder/list-management service out there. Much much better than any self-hosted script. They manage all the legal compliance stuff, all the double-opt-in & unsubscribe requirements, and they go to the huge lengths needed to get "whitelisted" by all the big providers. Basically, if you use a self-hosted list, you are looking at a delivery rate of 60-70% tops, with AWeber, you’ll get 95-99%.

So you see why I want to use AWeber rather than the (very nice) built-in script Joomla provides. Yet, it isn’t just a matter of hacking it into the templates. I suppose I could’ve done that, but it would have been annoying and I wouldn’t have been able to manage things via the admin console inside Joomla.

The plugin

Instead of hacking it in, I wrote a plugin component/module set for Joomla. Feel free to use the GPL package joomla-awresponder 1. Note that you must unpack the zip, as there are two packages inside, also do read the very short INSTALL.txt file, since you must take one manual step to make it work.

Enjoy! The Joomla package system is very nice, and only took an evening to figure out. I’m sure I’ll be writing more as my store requires it.

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