Enable newsletter subscription for orders placed in the backend

Question

I thought this would be a fairly common need and was surprised not to find any tutorials on it from some quick searches I did.

I was looking for a way to enable a site admin to subscribe a customer to the newsletter when placing an order through the backend.

Answer 1

I'm still assuming there's probably a native way to do this in Magento but haven't found it yet.

The way I ended up solving it was by rewriting

Clean_Sales_Block_Adminhtml_Sales_Order_Create_Form_Account::_prepareForm()

and

Clean_Sales_Model_Adminhtml_Sales_Order_Create::_prepareCustomer()

Both of the rewrites can be done pretty cleanly by relying on the parent method and then just dropping in the logic after that.

At first I thought I could get away with using a Customer Attribute (if you're on Enterprise) called is_subscribed, but it's not a very clean solution. It will subscribe the customer but it won't respect the newsletter subscriber's state for subsequent orders and generally won't be sync'd with the subscriber status.