We (illuminea) are so excited that we could be part of the creation of a shiny new plugin: Official Mad Mimi Sign Up Forms! for Mad Mimi, the email marketing service.
Mad Mimi is all about making their users life simple. With WordPress being the winner in terms of market share for CMSs, they wanted to serve that market.
When Mad Mimi asked us to work with them to develop their official WordPress plugin, we were super excited, since we love WordPress and urge all our clients to offer newsletters! This plugin does what many of our clients will need, which is to easily integrate Mad Mimi sign up forms into their site.
How does it work?
Well… it pretty much does what it says. It makes sure that WordPress peeps have an easy way to display sign up forms on any WordPress site and don’t have to mess around with form embed code.
The way the plugin works is that first you create some forms in Mad Mimi, so that people can, let’s say, get updates about all the yummy cupcakes you’re baking (only organic, sugar-free, fat-free of course), and then head on over to the WordPress plugin, and validate your API key.
Once you’re connected, you’ll see all of your lists displayed and you can insert any of your Mad Mimi forms into your site by using a widget, shortcode, or template tag.
Behind the Scenes
As part of the development team, I got to be involved in the whole creation process for the Mad Mimi plugin. After talking to Mad Mimi about what features they want and don’t want, we understood that they are really in tune with their customers and know exactly what functionality they would find helpful (easy-to-use widgets) and what functionality their customers wouldn’t want (tons of configuration and options).
Once we had a list of the features, we created a mockup wireframe in my fave program Mockflow (drag and drop heaven) to create a preview of how the settings page and widget could look in WordPress.
Mockup preview:
After some back and forth discussion, we agreed on the final version and coded the mockup into a reality. After a series of tests and minor changes, and writing up the documentation, it launched on June 3, 2013!
The real deal in a WordPress installation:
Despite their name, the Mad Mimi team is so nice and fun to work with, and at one point, they even said “You guys are friggin’ pro”. Does life get any better?
You can download the Official Mad Mimi plugin here
If you try it out, we’d love to hear what you think and if you have any suggestions for future versions.
You can read more about the plugin release on the Mad Mimi blog.