hi Brian,
Glad to hear you find the site useful, its always good to hear.
It's possible to create a check box for the newsletter, you'll be able to set this up exactly as we did in the tutorial when creating a checkbox to request a CD-ROM demo. The extra step that you need to take is to somehow extract the data from DotNetNuke to compile a list of newsletter subscribers. - At the moment I haven't done this with the latest version of DotNetNuke.
On DNN creative the newsletter subscription is managed through the security roles ( there is a newsletter security role). I then extract the users that are assigned to this security role using enterprise manager and import them into a web-based e-mail service. - I use www.constantcontact.com. - of course the e-mails have opt out links which opts out through constantcontact, so I have to ensure that the security role list and the constant contact list are kept in sync. - This method is not ideal as it does involve quite a bit of maintenance.
DNN creative is currently running on version 3.2 and I would hope to change how the newsletter subscriptions are managed when I upgrade to 4.4.
- It could be worth your time having a look at the e-mail optin module that comes with the bonus. I haven't used it, but it may cover your needs.
if you are going to be creating a large e-mail list, it's worth considering your options at the beginning. I found that with using the DotNetNuke newsletter module, once my list went beyond 500 e-mails, it was struggling to send them through my hosting provider. - So that was when I switched to an online e-mail service from constantcontact.com
if you want to look at the DotNetNuke newsletter module there is a tutorial on it here:
How to send Newsletters in DotNetNukethanks, and happy skinning!