Your subscribe form on a Ghost site

The HTML card is where the snippet goes. Type /html in the Ghost editor, paste both lines of the script embed into the card, and the subscribe form renders on the published post in your newsletter’s colour and body font.

Both snippets are in Settings, then the Subscribers tab, each with a copy button and a preview of the form beside it. Ghost publishes an HTML card exactly as you wrote it, so nothing needs escaping or rewriting first.

Where the HTML goes

An HTML card puts the form in one post or page. Code injection, under Ghost’s own settings, puts it on every page of the site, and a theme edit does the same thing if you would rather the form sat in a fixed place in the layout.

The two can be combined: the script tag in the site footer through code injection, and a bare <div data-issuemint></div> in whichever posts should show a form. One script tag serves every container on the page.

Which of the two snippets to use

The script embed. Ghost runs scripts on the front end without complaint, and the script embed is the version that confirms a signup in place instead of sending the reader to a thank-you page on our domain.

The plain HTML form is worth having in reserve for a page where you want no script of ours at all. It posts a normal form and needs no JavaScript from anybody, which is the only real difference in what a reader can do with it.

Why code injection on its own shows nothing

Issue Mint’s script looks for a container and stops if there is not one. Code injection adds the script tag but no container, so a site set up that way loads the script, finds nothing marked data-issuemint, and quietly does nothing.

The emailed version of a post

A Ghost post that also goes out as an email carries the form on the web only. Email clients do not run scripts, and most of them remove forms outright, so an HTML card that works on your site is inert in the inbox.

This matters less than it sounds, because the people reading the email have already subscribed to something. Where it does matter is a post you expect to be passed on: the shared link shows the form, the forwarded email does not. Issue Mint takes the same route with its own issues, which is why every issue page on the archive site every newsletter gets carries a subscribe form of its own.

Ghost members and your Issue Mint list

Issue Mint has no connection to Ghost’s members feature. It does not read Ghost members, does not write to them, and does not know they exist, so a reader who subscribes through the form is on your Issue Mint list and nowhere else.

If you are moving off Ghost’s own newsletter, export the members list from Ghost and bring it in as a CSV rather than waiting for the form to collect the same people again. Signups from the form arrive marked as coming from the embed, which keeps them distinguishable from an import on your subscriber list.