Best of several imperfect solutions

The most highly rated MailChimp form widget requires a $35 PRO subscription to enable group selection – and that’s too high for my non-profit volunteer-powered wordpress site. That feature works in this plugin with out the big bucks

The embed code provided by MC that I tried in a text widget doesn’t display success or validation messages due to an issue with jquerey 1.6 described here: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/mailchimp-embed-not-showing-success-response This is simply too confusing to the end user to be viable.

In spite of its low rating this plugin worked perfectly for me out of the box.

PLUSSES:
You can enable by logging into your MC account instead of having to search for your API code.

You can adjust the colors of form from the control panel

They supply a css styling ‘cheat sheet’

You can fully customize which fields are displayed.

You can disable javascript if there are conflicts

Optional “unsubscribe” link

MISSING:
Would prefer that it didn’t load CSS automatically – option to disable this would be nice.

Would be nice to offer an Update preferences link in addition to unsubscribe.

I didn’t experience the crashing issues described in the one star ratings. Would be nice to know which themes/plugins those folks are using