[Plugin: Subscribe Widget] Great, but could use some code improvements

First of all, I love this plugin. It’s terribly easy to use and it does just want I need: display some nice subscribe icons. However, from a developer’s point of view, I think you could improve your code a little bit to make life easier for other theme/plugin developers.

Currently, at plugin version 1.1.0, you have hard-coded the HTML around the widget like this:

if( $title != '' ){
    echo '<h2>'.$title.'</h2>';
}
echo '<div id="subscribe-widget">';
// ...
echo '</div>';

Although this will work fine in many cases, it’s not very good practice. For example: when the widgets are placed in an <ul> as individual <li> elements, the <div> breaks (X)HTML-validity. Also, not everyone theme uses <h2> for widget titles, <h3> is also a common choice.

Therefore I suggest to make use of the arguments provided by WordPress’s widget engine: before_widget, after_widget, before_title and after_title. This will not only make the output valid HTML, it gives much more flexibility and consistency to the theme developer!

echo $before_widget;
if( $title != '' ){
    echo $before_title . $title . $after_title;
}
// ...
echo $after_widget;

Note: I placed $before_widget before the title, as it’s better and more consistent to have your #subscribe-widget contain the title element too.

Hopefully you can do something with my suggestions and keep up the good work!

– Mattias.