Newsletter Center V. 0.8 BETA

[hqarrse2]

Hey There--

Just curious - what happens to the session data, etc. if a person is shopping, fills up a cart with products, and in the middle of their shopping they decide to add their name to your newsletter which directs them to completely non ZC pages?

As long as you're using cookies and not the zenid URL session system then you will not lose the ZenCart session as long as you don't spend too long in PHPLists and it times out.

Also please see my comment about not hijacking this thread which is specifically for Newsletter Center. I don't want to interfere!

[hqarrse2]

Hi Mr Meech! Sorry about the thread comment - I didn't notice I was replying to you :)

[panelcart]

So will there be an update to this or not? Its been ages.

[hqarrse2]

If you're interested in my version then I have posted an update in the relevant thread. In summary should be live over the weekend.

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showth...836#post597836

[Ciaran121music]

Could somone confirm if this orinigla module works, im interested in setting it up but it sounds theres been quite a few problems. http://www.modyourzencart.com/free-o...sletter-center will this work?

[mrmeech]

So will there be an update to this or not? Its been ages.

Could somone confirm if this orinigla module works, im interested in setting it up but it sounds theres been quite a few problems. http://www.modyourzencart.com/free-o...sletter-center will this work?

Hello thread -

To those of you wondering why my development of this fell off the face of the face of the earth, there are two simple reasons:

1) I must make money to pay rent and eat, and as this doesn't provide me with that, i was left to prioritize and take care of my well being. Life happens, and it's how you get back up that matters.

2) The development of the PHPlist integration was going pretty smoothly, working configuration and installation components into the ZC admin, and then one day i hit an enormous programming wall when the complexity of handling some of the logic to merge and keep those two specific databases sync'd together in a fully functional, non-shoddy manner. In retrospect i probably should have uploaded where i was and let other people take it from there.

I understand this has inconvenienced a few of you and was not in the best interest of the community, but it was unfortunately what happened. So!! What next? Here is the conclusion i have come to:

A week ago i feverishly started investigating mailing list solutions that could realistically be integrated into ZC while still being realistic about the high probability that the ZC team will eventually expand the built-in newsletter functionality. I am sure they are aware that it is a weakness in the software design, but they have much higher priorities right now - if you've followed the announcements threads, they are doing a huge amount of cleaning up procedural code and changing the database structure to MPTT. Read about that stuff here: http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=104346

Let me get back on track - the whole ZC developement big picture was a (semi-related) tangant. I was talking about comparing newsletter applications... i know many of you out there have strong opinions out there on this, and your feedback is welcome, but here is mine: Aside from being overly verbose and poorly documented/structured in it's code, PHPList developement has seemed to have slowed down to a CRAWL without a clear roadmap or version schedule. That concerns me. Software must always have a vision (and the work to support that vision) and the desire to be successful, and i strongly sense that that is lacking from that team. So i looked into other applications, and one that i came across that i feel pretty good about is PoMMo for a number of reasons. There are good vibes in the forum - If you read through PHPlist's forum there is a fair amount of negativity toward the dev. team. Not a good sign. The zen cart team is amazing, and i value them greatly. So that's one thing i was looking for in a newsletter solution.

The bottom line: I am indefinitely suspending my work on integrating PHPList with ZC. I am instead working on integrating PoMMo with ZC because of it's intuitive nature, ease of implementation, well documented code, simple database design, etc etc... If you'd like to follow me in this you are more than welcome to. Thanks to my experience with trying to merge ZC with PHPList, I have a head start with knowing what *REALLY* needs to be done to make this work. I also do not want to be the only technical support reference point on this, so i would love for a few other people to join me in this venture to ease the support burden once completed. Let it be noted about PoMMo: Click tracking and bounce handling are still getting hashed through. I weighed a lot of the pros and cons, and PoMMo has less development and implementation evils than the others (in my opinion).

What a long post that maybe nobody will fully read!! Anyway, let me know your thoughts!!! Thanks so much!

[Stuff4Toys]

I took a look at http://www.pommo.org/ and although it has reasonably current development, it seems to lack many features that I have grown accustomed to with PHPlist.

I looked at the demo site and looked at the past test mailing. I don't see any statistics, click tracking. opens, viewers, etc. It might be easier to integrate, but without these statistics it seems impossible to judge the effectiveness of my mail campaigns other than waiting for the dollars to roll in.

Minor Note:
The FCKeditor that is used lacks the View source button, which is imperative for those of us that are used to FCKeditor.

I personally wish you would renew your enthusiasm towards integrating PHPlist. It would be nice if the PHPlist developers would renew their vigor also.

My 2¢ worth, correct me if I am wrong. I will be happy to assist in testing, as I am NOT a programmer.
JOhn ><>

[hqarrse2]

Mine has been running fine since I last posted. It may not do exactly what you want as it's made for my needs but it's easy to modify and working 100%. I can't see the need for any other system really.

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showth...836#post597836

[bx1]

Hi All,

I'm fairly new to this newsletter subscription thing. I only started looking outside Zen Cart for newsletter subscriptions not so long ago as I thought it was time to move forward. From what I can see, many people have tried to implement some form of newsletter program into Zen Cart but there doesn't seem to be a definitive answer for it. I was just wondering if anyone is still working on the mod or if they're awaiting the release of Zen Cart 2.0?

Just one more note... keep up all the good work everyone, my site, and I'm sure many site's would not exist without the help of the many great minds contributing to Zen Cart!

[mrmeech]

...many people have tried to implement some form of newsletter program into Zen Cart but there doesn't seem to be a definitive answer for it. I was just wondering if anyone is still working on the mod or if they're awaiting the release of Zen Cart 2.0?

I can't answer for other people, but i have put work on this onto hold for a bit because as ZC moves completely to OOP programming in 2.0, most everything would need to be re-built.

For the 2.0 release they do list in the road map that they are changing the mailing engine, but i'm not sure if that is any hint at changes to the way newsletters work or function. For what it's worth, on the 1.4 roadmap, which IS the 2.0 roadmap, they mention, "email infrastructure replaced with SwiftMailer instead of phpMailer which is faltering in light of contemporary server configurations."