I have come here for the excact same reason. There are a lot of other great plugins, but I really only need this one! Simply put: I want users to be able to subscribe to parts or the whole blog, and I want to be able to enable it for them...

I found this thread: http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=17595&highlight=subscription but I'm not really too eager to go into mySQL databases. I'm kinda past that age.

So - please - anyone - just a subscription checkmark / plugin / admin interface or anything!?

Is there a plugin for non registered readers ie visitors/guests to subscribe to the posts via email instead of rss?

More like a 'newsletter' function perhaps - but just the posts themselves.

google botablog and see if that'll work for the "email instead of rss feed" thing. If I understand it correctly, you put a link on your blog to botablog and your visitors go there to "email subscribe". botablog reads your feed and convert it to an email for you.

Thanks EdB for your super speedy response.

Perhaps this could be something to consider for the next release?

It seems to be a 'service' used on about 50% of the blogs in my niche, and certainly would fill the gap between those who only just know how to surf the internet/send emails and those that do know what an rss agregator is and are not scared to use it!

I first found botablog in (get ready) a skin back in the 0.8 days! If you want to use that service in a 2.* installation then all you would have to do is pop the code into a Free HTML widget for your sidebar (or wherever). What I mean is why put it in the core when not everyone will want or need it, and it can be easily added by anyone who does dig on it?

(I've been pointing people who asked for "email instead of rss" to botablog ever since way back then and *no one* has ever reported back if they tried it and like it or hated it or anything. ah well eh? It does seem like a nice idea for those not into using a feed reader right?)

I trust your recommendation EdB, and will sign up to botablog.

Intrinsically I trust B2Evolution to the extent that if something is in B2Evo then I know that it works. No point adding 'extras' that may not - if you get my drift.

Yeah I can dig it. Like, I'd like to take advantage of the photoblog feature even though there are lots of photo gallery softwares out there. I just don't have any feel for which ones are good and which ones suck. Bumped into a problem where the file size of the scans I'm doing (lots of old family photos) are too big for it to handle, and haven't gone back to that project yet.

Let us know how it works out for you. Especially stuff like did you have to create an account or do those who follow you via botablog? And really doubly especially if botablog ever sends spam to those who follow you through their service!

Some preliminary feedback.

A blog owner has to sign up/create an account - url, email address and password.

In the process of doing so today it threw a (CakePHP) error but using the back arrow showed that my registration was successful.

They send you an email with a confirmation link in it.

Which takes you to the code (It uses auto-discovery to grab your blog's RSS url) - either a button with "botablog" on it or a text link 'Receive e-mail alerts when this blog updates!' (which of course you can change).

You can add further blogs to your account too. For each you see the 'State of Health' and the number of subscribers.

You can also choose to add blogs to receive emails from too - so I presume the registration process then also applies to a person wanting to follow your blog.

You can choose to receive just a summary with a link to the post, or the entire post in your alert; and either for each post or a daily digest.

Time will tell!