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Implementing subscription

The subscription webpage displays a form in which a user can enter an email address, a name and a password. The subscription page performs basic validation on the form fields, and creates a new Contact record.

The following image shows the sample subscribe page:

When a visitor submits their subscription data, the subscription page checks whether the user is unique and displays an error message if this is not the case. If subscription is successful, Audience Manager performs the following steps:
  1. It stores the identifier that was used when the webpage saved the Contact. The identifier is called Subscribed in the sample files, and in the illustration it is Subscribed-EN for an English publication.
  2. It synchronizes the Contact with Content Manager.
  3. It checks the identifier in the configuration file (OutboundEmail.xml) to find out if a confirmation email should be sent to the Contact. By default the sample subscription model includes a confirmation email.
  4. It sends the email based on the configured Page, subject, sender address and so on.
  5. The confirmation email Page includes a link to the subscription confirmation webpage.
The following diagram provides an example of how you could set up confirmation emails for two publications, one in English and one in Dutch:

Implement or customize subscriptions as follows:

  • For ASP.NET websites—modify or customize the subscribe.aspx and the subscribe.aspx.cs pages and deploy them on your website
  • For JSP websites—modify or customize the subscribe.jsp page and deploy it on your website

To create a confirmation page to send as an email to a Contact, you use the Add Subscription URLs to Package Template Building Block in your Page Template.

Add code to your Page Template to insert links to your page using the Modular Templating Framework:

  • To the Dreamweaver Template, add an AudienceManager_ConfirmURL method to create a link to the webpage in which a new subscriber confirms their subscription. For a confirmation this is an example, where the URL is found in the your Audience Management tab of the Publication properties.
    <a href="@@AudienceManager_ConfirmURL@@">Click here to confirm subscription</a>
  • Define a query string in the Confirm URL Query String parameter to add to the Confirm Subscription URL. The Subscription confirmation page URL is the URL of the webpage in which a new subscriber confirms their subscription and is defined in a Publication's properties in the Audience Management tab.

You need to record the TCM URI of the newly created confirmation page for configuring confirmation in Audience Manager. For Cloud users, this configuration step for confirmation emails is something you need to request from SDL Customer Support.