Here’s a neat Tell-A-Friend Plugin that I use.

www.freetellafriend.com

or from the Wordpress.org plugin search pages:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tell-a-friend/

What does the “Tell A Friend” Plugin Do?

Not strickly a Wordpress Plugin, because there is no code to download and install onto the server, just a Hyperlink to add to either your theme menu, or sidebar, or to embed within a post or page.
After you have added the link to FreeTellaFriend to your Blog, then when a visitor finds your site useful, helpful, informative, funny or whatever and wants to share it with many of their friends, then they can click on the Tell-A-Friend link and send your website details to many of their friends in one go.

They will have the option to either:

• Manually enter 5 email addresses and then send, or
• Select contacts from their online mail accounts: Hotmail, Yahoo! Gmail, Live,
  AOL, Lycos, Mail.com, or
• Submit Your Site to a Social Bookmarking website such as:
  • Yahoo! Bookmarks
  • Yahoo! MyWeb
  • Live Favorites
  • Google Bookmarks
  • MySpace
  • FaceBook
  • Aol Favorites
  • Multiply
  • Digg
  • Ask
  • StumbleUpon
  • Segnalo
  • Technorati
  • Del.icio.us
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • SlashDot
  • Propeller
  • …..plus many others!!!

How To Install “Free Tell A Friend”

First decide whether you just want to add the “Tell A Friend” option to your site, or do you also want to know some statistics such as how often the Tell A Friend funtion has been clicked, and how many “friends” your website has been sent to.

If you just want to use the function and are not bothered about statistics, then goto the Free Website: www.freetellafriend.com/get_button/ and just Build Your Button.

…or if you want Statistics, then register for an account at FreeTellaFriend first, then Build Your Button: www.freetellafriend.com/account/register/.
Also, I’ve just discovered, when you register an account at Freetellafriend.com you can submit the websites that you place the function on, to your account and you can then edit the default text that is used on the email that the Tell-A-Friend function uses. If you have several websites you can submit them all to your account and have different email text for each website… neat

Copy the HTML Code that the FreeTellaFriend site builds for you, it should look something like this: (where < is replaced with [ and > replaced with ]… so that it displays as text rather than code on this page!):

[!-- FreeTellaFriend - BEGIN --]
[a href="http://www.freetellafriend.com/tell/" onclick="window.open('http://www.freetellafriend.com/tell/?title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&url='+encodeURIComponent(document.location.href), 'freetellafriend', 'scrollbars=1,menubar=0,width=617,height=530,resizable=1,toolbar=0,location=0,status=0,screenX=210,screenY=100,left=210,top=100'); return false;" title="Tell a Friend" target="_blank"][img alt="Tell a Friend" src="http://serv1.freetellafriend.com/button_black2.gif" border="0" /][/a]
[!-- FreeTellaFriend - END --]

Now Decide where you want to place the Link/Button on your Wordpress Blog.

1. On the Menu Navigation Bar (like on this site)

Login to your WP-ADMIN section and then go to “Design” and “Theme Editor” section. Then click on the Header option from the Right Sidebar. The HTML/PHP code for the HEader section will now be displayed in the main window. Page down until you find the Navigation Section. There will be some code there that lists the Page Titles in an Unordered List…. something like this:

[ul id="nav"]
[?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=2&sort_column=menu_order'); ?]
[/ul]

(again I’ve swapped < for [ and > for ], just so that it displays as text on this page.) Now insert the FreeTellaFriend code into an additional List Item tag. ie. Like this:

[ul id="nav"]
[?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=2&sort_column=menu_order'); ?]

[li]

[!-- FreeTellaFriend - BEGIN --]
[a href="http://www.freetellafriend.com/tell/" onclick="window.open('http://www.freetellafriend.com/tell/?title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&url='+encodeURIComponent(document.location.href), 'freetellafriend', 'scrollbars=1,menubar=0,width=617,height=530,resizable=1,toolbar=0,location=0,status=0,screenX=210,screenY=100,left=210,top=100'); return false;" title="Tell a Friend" target="_blank"]Tell a Friend[/a]
[!-- FreeTellaFriend - END --]

[/li]

[/ul]

Now Click on the UPDATE Button at the bottom of the page and View the Website to check it’s worked ok.

2. To install Tell-A-Friend Button on the Sidebar.

If your theme supports Widgets, then add a new TEXT box to the Sidebar Widgets, name it “Tell a Friend” (or whatever you want!) and then copy/paste the code from the Tellafreind.com website. Don’t forget if you want the button to be in the middle of the Sidebar, then enclose the code within “Center” tags:

[Center]

….. paste here …….

[/Center]

If your theme does not support Widgets, then follow the instuctions above for install on the Menu/Navigation bar, but select the SideBar Sections instead of the Header Section.

3. To Add a Tell-A-Friend Button within a Page or Post.

Edit the page and select the HTML view on the Editor rather than the Visual (wysiwyg) view. Now go to the place where you want the button to appear and copy/paste the code from the FreeTellaFriend.com website. Just like this one: