Newbie Questions

Hi all,

I’m new at this and I am hitting a few walls, so apologies in advance for the barrage of questions which will follow in the next few days.

Some background info. We’ve been running a custom mailing list program which was working seamlessly with our sites but as the program is no longer maintained phplist seems like the best option.

For now:

  1. In the old program we had over 2700 subscribers categorised in 3 lists: ALL, LOCAL, PRESS.

I have managed to migrate all subscribers but the lists they belonged to were not imported and they are currently all in the ‘newsletter’ list. Is there a way to get everyone under the lists they belong to?

1a. The way we have been running these lists, subscribers did not have an option in changing those preferences. ie, we do not want to send emails internationally if it is a very local event, or we do not want people who are not members of the press to be receiving press emails. Is there a way to prevent people from selecting such options?

  1. Is there a way to parse and present the number of subscribers on other pages in our website?

  2. Is there a way to have more fields in the public side subscriber page? Our emails up to now had NAME, SURNAME, and EMAIL as required fields and WEBSITE as an optional one. We would like to maintain this system.

One way is to split the subscribers into three files outside of phplist then import each of those into the correct list. You can them remove subscribers from the newsletter list.

Follow the “back to phplist.org” link to find the online manual, which should explain about user attributes.

Hi duncanc,

Thanks for the advice! Splitting the subscribers before importing them is indeed a good idea.

I have checked the manual and this is how I understand about how a subscriber page is made.
went to Config>Subscribe pages, clicked on “Select the attributes to use,” check the check-boxes next to the “Is this attribute required?:” label for ‘Name’, ‘Surname,’ and ‘Email address.’ I left the ‘Website’ check-box unchecked, and saved.

The front end form still looks like it only has the ‘Email address *’ and ‘Confirm your email address *’ fields. ‘Name,’ ‘Surname,’ and ‘Website’ are excluded from the page.

Do you know what I might be doing wrong?

@colak There is also a check box to use the attribute which you may have missed

image

Indeed I did miss that one! The GUI takes some time to get used to but it makes sense once you do.

Now for the other question. Is there a way to prevent people from selecting which lists to subscribe to?

I know that the subscription page does not have to have a list but it seems that in the user preferences all lists are listed?

I’m still running this on test mode, on an admin account so I’m not sure how the system works for subscribers.

@colak You can look at setting the lists to “private”, i.e. not public.

Thanks so much again. I did see that setting but I was not sure what “private” actually entailed. All is slowly becoming clearer.

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This is the last question in this thread:) In our ageing system I was able to get the total number of subscribers and parse it in the subscribe and other pages of the site by using <?php echo getCount('table_name_subscribers',"1"); ?>. Is there an equivalent way to get that?

This could easily be added to the rest API, but what’s your use case? Mostly admins will want to know totals of specific lists.

Hi samtuke,

It is a matter of creating trust. This is how we use it now:)
http://www.neme.org/newsletter/ - Check the last line:)

This is a beautiful subscribe page - congratulations! Are you using Ajax submit to Senf the data, or a custom form submission?

Please create a github issue requesting the new API call for the rest API repository.

Thanks! The form is a very well scripted php mail() plugin for the Textpattern CMS. The fields and number of subscribers, are connecting to another older TXP install residing elsewhere on our server.

I have just added a feature request on github.

@colak Interesting - so you will migrate from the TXP hosted page to a phpList subscribe page?

Yes and no. Our site will still be powered by txp, but our newsletter will be using the phplist. I’m currently spending all my spare time trying to figure out how I can seamlessly combine them. The com_connect plugin, apart from being a very flexible form mailer, plugin, it can also connect to other systems… From the docs:

“Or you could intercept the entire mail process, handle mailing yourself with a third party system, and tell com_connect to skip its internal mailing process.”

I am trying to see if I can have the subscribe and unsubscribe pages hosted within txp but handled by phpmail.

Although I know enough about txp, and I can also get support regarding issues I do not know about from the txp forum, I admittedly currently still know very little about phplist so I am in the hair-pulling stage.

Textpattern has a very friendly and helpful community but we are currently having an issue with newsletter systems. I am trying to bridge this gap, admittedly not successfully yet. Any support I get here, and my efforts regarding this integration, will eventually be posted in txp official sites for others who might be interested in adopting the system.