The idea of creating a Drupal block containing a subscription form for a specific CiviMail mailing list (or for all of them) comes regularly on the forum, so I decided to try out how much work would it be to create one.

It turns out this task is fairly simple, if one knows the proper URLs for CiviMail subscription pages. The URLs are of the form …civicrm/mailing/subscribe?reset=1 (for all mailing lists) and …civicrm/mailing/subscribe?reset=1&gid=X (for a mailing list with group id of X). For example, these two URLs point to subscription pages on our Drupal demo installation: http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/mailing/subscribe?reset=1 (all mailing lists), http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/mailing/subscribe?reset=1&gid=2 (the Newsletter Subscribers list).

If having a separate page is not really the best outcome, there’s a possibility of creating similar Drupal blocks. The simplest(?) way of doing this is to look at the sources of the above pages, strip them down as much as necessary and then create an HTML Dupal block from the resulting code.

From my quick try, it seems like the below is a nice starting point (for a block listing all groups) – of course, in your case you need to adjust the URL, the names of the lists and their respective ids:

<form action="http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/mailing/subscribe" method="post">
  <p>Email: <input name="email" type="text" id="email" /></p>
  <table>
    <tr>
      <td><input name="mark_x_4" type="checkbox" value="1" /></td>
      <td>Advisory Board</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td><input name="mark_x_2" type="checkbox" value="1" /></td>
      <td>Newsletter Subscribers</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td><input name="mark_x_3" type="checkbox" value="1" /></td>
      <td>Summer Program Volunteers</td>
    </tr>
  </table>
  <p>
    <input name="_qf_Subscribe_next" value="Subscribe" type="submit" />
  </p>
</form>

Creating a block for just a single list subscription is even easier – all you need to do is to pass the id as a hidden field:

<form action="http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/mailing/subscribe" method="post">
  <p>
    Email: <input name="email" type="text" id="email" />
    <input type="hidden" name="mark_x_2" value="1" />
    <input name="_qf_Subscribe_next" value="Subscribe" type="submit" />
  </p>
</form>

If you have any comments or questions on the above, please feel free to join this thread on our forum.

Update: In v2.2 you can also add a hidden field to redirect the user to a specific page once they have subscribed (it will redirect to referer if not specified). The relevant html snippet to add within the form is:

<input type="hidden" name="destination" value="http://www.yahoo.com/" />