Missing Attributes selection tab in Campaign manager not documented in docs.phplist.com

📚 Documentation
1

I have been using phpList on my server (managing about 200,000 records) for 5-6 years and am a huge fan. I recently migrated from version 2.x to 3.2.4, and lost the ability to apply attributes to extract subscriber subsets from lists in the campaign manager. I am a legacy user upgrading from within the application, so I wasn’t even aware of the new phpList.org website or the plugin architecture.

Google top search results for troubleshooting this problem point to docs.phplist.com, which has a heading, II Userguide -> Configuration Functions -> Attributes, describing an Attributes tab which is non-existant in the current default version. A subsequent Google search on “missing phpList Atttibutes tab” yields a lot of confused user questions, but not a lot of competent solutions. Following suggestions for editing config.php and modifying code led to a single post saying “I think there’s a plugin for that,” prompting me to do a manual drill-down to find and install the (excellent) Segment plugin (and the required base plugin).

I was going to post this to the forum to help others going through the same experience and discovered the new website (with the more complete documentation). I don’t know if docs.phplist.com is maintained or deprecated, but perhaps a link on that landing page pointing to the newer manual would be really helpful for those of us that land there by virtue of Google or old bookmarks?

2

Hi, the attribute selection is now a plugin, if you go to config > plugins you will find it :smile:

We are still working though the old docs and removing the deprecated ones - in the end it will become a technical resource and the manual will become the main resource.

I am not sure about adding in the phpList 2 > 3 stuff though. Perhaps a blog would be better? There are not many people still on two now as it’s been a long time.

Well done for upgrading :slight_smile: It’s important and you did good :slight_smile: Don’t forget phpList.com keeps you up to date all the time, so if you don’t like upgrading it might be the place for you :smile:

a
x

3

I fully respect the documentation is a work in progress, and all the more reason I wanted to give you feedback. This is more about the discrepancy between the two official sources of documentation, and not so much about v2.x -> v3.x. The new software is great, and made upgrading quite easy, but the discrepancy between the documentation of Attributes (as a default feature) in the docs.phplist.com and the very different documentation of Attributes (as a plugin) in phplist.org/manual made implementing that feature unnecessarily confusing, if someone lands on docs.phplist.com (which was my top google result). If docs.phplist.com will be preserved and represented to the public as an authoritative resource, then it would be helpful to (at some time) include a similar notation on the Attributes heading that it is a plugin feature and not default behavior, IMHO. Many thanks for a great software package!

4

I agree with you totally, however, phpList is a community project - if no one volunteers to prune the old docs it aint necessarily gonna get done. I am happy to help organise another documentation sprint to get a group together to fix this. Would you like to help out?

5

Hi @uucom, you have a good point, I’m wondering how we could incorporate your ideas into a practical solution.

Maybe we can have one of those ‘rolling balls’ like in the old forums? It would send the user to a little flowchart that asks what version they are on, and would send them to the old or new documentation, depending on the answer…

Perhaps we should also have a list of everything in the old docs, and whether or not is exists in the new docs (somekind of a ‘porting’ map), and that becomes a ‘todo’ list of items to move over. It’s a big project, but not an infinite one!

6

Hi, we desperately need to do this, I have started it already but just been to busy.

I made this speadsheet a while ago move_to_org - Google Sheets

It has all the chapters on docs and resources listed, with a series of possible actions, like delete and redirect, keep and update etc.

The idea is we should end up with one set of techical docs and one set of user docs and that’s it.

The old docs (in orange) may have some useful info in stll, so we need to find those parts and note them down some place.

A big job we can do over time I hope?

7

Thanks for putting the spreadsheet together.
Maybe the first step is for me to look it over in detail, and see if I can verify the list, etc.
Perhaps the best way to go through this is to try to do one item per week, or something like that.

1 Like
8

Hi

yeah! good idea!

The list was basically a copy paste of the index page(s). The main issue worrying me right now is that we had originally planned to redirect and remove all the phpList 2 docs, so they were replaced by the new manual, but there still seem to be a ton of people on v 2. I wonder if we can redirect the old links still but host the old docs somewhere as an archive?