Themed newsletters idea was less about branding the emails and more about defining a set of attributes describing the types of emails being sent, and allow users to opt in and out of each. Such as, they could opt in to "Announcement" emails but out of "Jokes" emails. As a fellow minimalist, this seems a bit overkill for right now, unless a lot of people report wanting this feature.
I dreamed about it, because if I had it, I may avoid to setup a newsletter system for my side. I need this, because I have to mail around informations about events we do. And having it integrated into vanilla seemed that nice for me: having one lockin, having one user db, having one gui for my users...
But I see, for most of the vanilla users, it would be an overkill. Perhabs I can enter the category by myself! Should be only one db-field more???
Alternative perhabs, there is an easy way to integrate a existing newsletter system into vanillas user managment?
Has someone some ideas how to integrate phplist into vanilla? Just subscribing and ansubscribing lists on the profiles page for example, nothing great! ;-)
Tiggr, IMHO phplist pretty much sucks... except for the fact that it allows 'pacing'...
I'm still looking for a great PHP-based mailing list tool with a decent UI... or even better, a hosted mailing list tool with PHP API. Comments/suggestions welcome.
FWIW, I've used constantcontact, mailermailer, vertical response, enflyer, bluehornet etc. Recently looked at campaignmonitor (which is really really nice but too pricey)
Ok, I've fought and wrestled with how to implement email pacing, and I'm sad to announce it will probably not happen. On at least one shared host I have, I couldn't get it to set up a cron job correctly, probably a permissions issue with apache (and I have my own server set up to where apache can never create a cron job for security reasons, so I understand why). Pacing with an SMTP server almost always results in a "too many connections from IP" error. Trying to use a single SMTP connection for many mails results in only 100 allowed sends on most SMTP servers. I tried implementing a method where everyone was put into the BCC field, but this results in the inability for custom replacement fields like {user}, {role}, etc. Trying the hack-ish "cron" job by checking a database every time index.php or comments.php is accessed is a little shady and depends greatly on your forum activity.
So, I think too many things are against me.
After my research and experimentation, I think pacing settings are best left up to the email server. If Sendmail is being used on the local server (should be the default option), then sendmail should be configured to queue and pace email sends. And in some base configurations on shared servers it is.
And the good news... because most Vanilla forums are probably on the order of several hundred users (maybe up to 1000), spam shouldn't be too much of an issue unless you get reported or you send a lot of email. I think people that are emailing over a thousand or more people should probably be looking into a professional mailer anyway. Trust me, I know they suck and wish I could put some UI skills into one that actually looks good, but I think in terms of Vanilla itself, this might be overkill. I really prefer using Vanilla's framework to accomplish things, and the Email class doesn't quite provide me enough functionality to use it for pacing. Ideally, pacing would be implemented in that class, or most ideally at the mailserver level.
If anyone has any ideas on ways I could overcome some of these issues, I'm open ears.
I'm hoping 1.1 will be complete in the next few days, I'm going to attempt to allow for Predefined Attributes integration at the same time.
I'm looking forward to coding it... because that will point to a time when I'm not completely busy out of my mind! hehe... I'm hoping this weekend will be the time.
And I'm still looking around for ways to accomplish pacing, because being spamlisted is bad. I may dig into some code of some mass mailers and see if any use tricks I can borrow.
It should work if you have SMTP settings correct... I'm using the same emailer as the base Vanilla code, so it should pick up the same settings you have defined globally. One of my clients had a server without sendmail access, and I think they wound up buying SMTP service for like $24/year.
http://www.authsmtp.com/auth-smtp/service.html to check it out. There are others like it if you google around.
I'd be wary of using a "free" smtp service as most likely spammers have latched on and it's blacklisted. Ideally your ISP would provide a number of relays per month for you, you'd have to check. You can also run an SMTP server on your home PC, but ISPs may not like that. :)
David,
I dismissed your suggestion previously, but now I see that those prices are PER YEAR.
That's actually really nice in comparison to other mailing services.
FYI, Toivo brought up the mailing list issue again:
http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/5067/lussumo--mailing-list
T.
Looks like there are compatibility issues with Friendly URL enabled. When I try to send a mail the button points to a page which can't be found. Something like http://www.yoursite.com/account/account.php. Any idea why it searches for an account folder?
Great :)
I have no clue, and have lost my development server, so I can't fool around with it quite yet... I'll definitely put that as a priority on my to-do list, though I'm being sent back to finish school (and still work full time), so free time is also limited. That's mainly the reason why I've not been active on this in awhile.
At first glance, the form is simply using a PostBackControl that sets account.php as its action. I'm assuming that when you're in the MassMailer form, the friendly url extension writes that page as http://www.yoursite.com/account/, and the form assumes account.php is inside that "folder". That's a big caveat of the Friendly URLs extensions, which you can see showing up all over the place with other extensions.
The best way to fix this is to use the rules in the following comment. That keeps problems like this from occurring:
http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/2444/friendly-urls/#Item_16
Let me know if that fix doesn't work with MassMailer and I'll try to delve in a bit this weekend on a server at work...
I had a look at my .htaccess file and it seems this fix is already integrated in Vanilla's last version. So I suppose the problem comes from somewhere else...
But despite this issue, this is really a useful extension. Thanks for sharing your work
Why am I getting [PREFIX] before the Subject on any email?
e.g. Subject: [Prefix] New email from blah blah
Edit : DUH! Dont bother responding. RTFM to me
Just some thoughts---
maybe have multiple opt-in / opt-out options (that brings up some tie-ins with predefined attributes, which it looks like you're planning on integrating) such as: email me your weekly/monthly newsletter; etc. These should be some of the filters that you're talking about. Also, maybe an email that gets automatically sent when certain attributes are met, given they haven't opted-out entirely. (Every time someone reaches 1 month of non-activity, send them a predefined message. Make sure not to send it more than once during one inactive "spurt" [for lack of a better word]. But definintely send it again if they got the email once, logged in a few times, and then were inactive for another month. [seems like that might be a bug waiting to happen])
these are just suggestions, and you may have thought of a few of them yourself. I just think they may be useful features to have.
$25 payable by PayPal to whoever can make this extension work, as planned for the 1.1 version:
- Provide opt-out via a user preference and possibly a clickable link - Allow for a configurable header and footer to be placed on each sent message - Work cleanly with basic installation of Friendly URLs
Comments
BBL
But I see, for most of the vanilla users, it would be an overkill. Perhabs I can enter the category by myself! Should be only one db-field more???
Alternative perhabs, there is an easy way to integrate a existing newsletter system into vanillas user managment?
Tiggr
It's me again!
Has someone some ideas how to integrate phplist into vanilla? Just subscribing and ansubscribing lists on the profiles page for example, nothing great! ;-)
Bye
Tiggr
I'm still looking for a great PHP-based mailing list tool with a decent UI... or even better, a
hosted mailing list tool with PHP API. Comments/suggestions welcome.
FWIW, I've used constantcontact, mailermailer, vertical response, enflyer, bluehornet etc.
Recently looked at campaignmonitor (which is really really nice but too pricey)
What's wrong with phplist? I've just installed it, and it looks fine to me!
Because, I need it for a hobby-page, I can't bye a professionell solution. I need a free one! Is there a better free solution out there?
It loosk like it would be an easy job, to put some newsletter subscribtion managment to vanilla, using phplist.
Tiggr
But despite this issue, this is really a useful extension. Thanks for sharing your work
- Provide opt-out via a user preference and possibly a clickable link
- Allow for a configurable header and footer to be placed on each sent message
- Work cleanly with basic installation of Friendly URLs
Thanks!