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Wordpress modal/popup windows?
November 14, 2010 7:04 PM   Subscribe

Wordpress filter: What's the best way to easily integrate a modal/popup window into a self-hosted wordpress blog?

I've got two things I'd like to accomplish on two different sites.

1) A simple popup window that will last for about a week, notifying visitors of a grand opening event.

2) Another simple popup asking for people to subscribe to the mailing list.

I want these to be the first thing people see when loading the main page.

I'd like it to notice people who have been to the site before, so it doesn't end up over-nagging people, I hate that.

But, if I run a popup for a week, and then a month later run a different pop-up, it would be nice for the code to notice the different and pop the second iteration of it up for repeat visitors.

These are for different sites. I'd love to find an easy to use plugin, or a simple way to code it in that would be wordpress friendly.

I can hack my way around wordpress themes, tailoring them to meet my needs, but I couldn't build one from scratch... hopefully that will give you a gauge to my coding skills. I'm better at debugging and mining than creating.
posted by peripatew to computers & internet (4 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Just for the record, I hate these.

Google-fu: "wordpress modal splash", though it's (more easily) dependent on what javascript you run. If you're looking for something outside of js, I don't know about that.
posted by rhizome at 8:55 PM on November 14, 2010


I'm going to question your question. I think you greatly understimate the annoyance these sorts of notifications cause and greatly overestimate their efficacy.

I would suggest either a metafilter-style notification bar that is short, as wide as the window, and located at the top of the screen, or a dynamic version of the same like at http://stackoverflow.com/ that can be closed, never to return, if the visitor so wishes.

You may worry that your visitors won't notice, but yes, they totally, totally will, particularly anyone who is interested at all in the event and/or mailing list. Creating a non-dynamic one would be as simple as adding to your theme something along the lines of:

<div style = "width:100%; text-align: center; background-color:#ffffff">Your message here.</div>

Play with padding/margins/borders/height etc. until you get the look you want, and make sure it's one of the first items, or the first item, after the <body> tag.

That would be my recommendation. Apologies if this is not appropriate for your particular situation.
posted by jsturgill at 10:06 PM on November 14, 2010


What you want is one of the WordPress announcement plugins. The one I have installed has had the author disappear and doesn't seem to be working anymore so I can't give you a recommendation.

You might just have to suck it up and deal with having to manually turn the announcement off.

Really though, only half of your idea is cool with me. The event is fine, have an announcement for that. But anytime I see a popup asking me to subscribe I start thinking that the blog sucks and is begging for readers. I don't think that's what you're trying to get across.
posted by theichibun at 5:42 AM on November 15, 2010


N-thing those who say that these are intrusive and likely to trigger a reflexive click on the 'back button'.

I think that these are colloquially known as 'welcome screens', a plugin like this one should do the trick. You can probably copy & paste the HTML from your existing contact form for the email signup.
posted by primer_dimer at 6:41 AM on November 15, 2010


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