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NewsMaster

Summary: How to handle newsletters and other mailings
Version: 2008-05-22
Prerequisites: next to none
Status: very nicely working (although the admin side is still in test)
Maintainer: Luigi (sort of)
Categories: CMS
Discussion: NewsMaster-Talk?

Questions answered by this recipe

How can I easily handle newsletters, publicity lists, notifications and other mailing need?

Description

Although major organizations would look at other solutions (like phplist) for their need, smaller sites with some hundreds (up to three/four thousands) addresses in their contact list might well benefit from this recipe.

This recipe is actually neither "developed on" nor "fully integrated with" pmwiki but it works quite nice (and without hassle) next to it.
All I did was lifting the "ccmail" software from http://www.cicoandcico.com/ (from which also the "features" list below was taken, and to which I point your attention in case you want to know more). Also, I made some smaller edits and slightly reworked a few files before making the package available here: the most notable change was in the login system, which originally suffered from a severe vulnerability bug (please read more about it in the "Notes" section below).

It would be nice to have some direct integration of this package with pmwiki, but none is available at the moment. In case you are looking for a fully wikified solution, please refer to Hans' FoxNotify recipe, instead.

Features

  • Dead easy to set-up and use
  • Works stunningly smooth
  • Like Pmwiki, all is handled with flat files, no database is required
  • Information Groups: users can choose what to receive informations about
  • Works with either php Mail() function, SendMail or SMTP
  • Multiple admins: any admin can enable more admins
  • Users can:
    • Subscribe
    • Unsubscribe
    • Modify their subscriptions, ie. changing their Information Groups
  • Administrator Page to manage:
    • Users (delete, restore)
    • Groups(create, delete, restore, hide to protect sensitive informations)
    • Mails (compose and send, show outbox etc...)
  • Very intuitive way to select Recipients. You can send a Mail to a single user, to some users, to one or more groups and so on.
  • Ability to send Mails in HTML, add attachments and so on, like any mail client
  • Privacy Protection: user addresses are crypted
  • Import Users from other Mailing List Managers
  • Easy Backup
  • WYSIWYG HTML editor
  • Scheduling
  • Validation Email
  • Language packs
  • History and Statistics

Installation

  1. Download the package, which is available at my own site http://www.kirpi.it/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Test.NewsMaster as I could not find a way to upload it here (there is a size limit set for .zip files at pmwiki.org site).
  2. Unpack the zipped archive. This will create a /news/ directory containing the software. Upload it to your server, just one step below your root address (something like www.example.com/news/).
  3. Visit the index page (www.example.com/news/), enter as an admin (admin/admin), and edit settings the way you like.
  4. As a safety measure, you might eventually want to create a new admin name and delete the admin:... line in the micro_login_system/userpwd.txt file.

Notes

Please consider this package as beta (although it all works really quite nice).

You can see a working user interface demo installed here http://www.kirpi.it/news/.
Feel free to test it as you like: subscribe, unsubscribe, modify subscription (do not worry, no real newsletters are sent).
In case you want to look at the admin side, the best is that you install the package in your own server: it is a matter of seconds, really.

I tried and rework the login system in order to solve the severe security bug reported at http://www.milw0rm.com/exploits/5433
Actually, the original package developer managed to fix the bug of his own creature about one week after I made my fork, so you can now safely grab the original script if you like.

Release Notes

  • 2008-05-22 Strengthened the login system
  • 2008-05-18 Login system reworked
  • 2008-05-15 First upload of the package

See Also

Contributors

Comments

See discussion at NewsMaster-Talk?

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