Book Image

phpList 2 E-mail Campaign Manager

Book Image

phpList 2 E-mail Campaign Manager

Overview of this book

Tired of an e-mail BCC list that scrolls off the page, or fiddly and hard-to-manage bulk mailing systems? You need phpList – a high-powered, robust, feature-packed mailing system that will get out of your way and get the job done! You want to know more about phpList? phpList is a popular open source e-mail campaign manager, sporting a powerful web frontend, rich message editor, and an advanced feature set. phpList 2 E-mail Campaign Manager will guide you from basic installation and setup through management, reporting, and automation of phpList, the world's most popular open source e-mail campaign manager. It also covers advanced customization and configuration of phpList. We start with a basic configuration, and finish with a full-featured e-mail management engine. You will work your way up from basic installation to advanced topics such as bounce automation, user and click-through tracking, and integration with third-party tools such as WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, and Blogger. Advanced topics such as securing your installation against spammers, attacks, and vulnerabilities are covered, as well as additional advanced and experimental features offered by phpList. This book is an invaluable guide for any e-mail publisher who wants a robust and powerful engine to manage their small-to-huge e-mail distribution empire.

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phpList 2 E-mail Campaign Manager
Jul, 2011 | 236 pages
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Table of Contents (18 chapters)
phpList 2 E-mail Campaign Manager
phpList 2 E-mail Campaign Manager
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Installation and Configuration
Installation and Configuration
Installing phpList files and database
Testing e-mail delivery
2
Setting up Subscriber Forms
Setting up Subscriber Forms
Basic concepts
Setting up a basic subscribe page
Creating a custom subscribe page
Putting a subscribe form on other applications
Summary
3
Setting up E-mail Bounce Handling
Setting up E-mail Bounce Handling
E-mail bounce handling
Testing and manually processing bounces
Reviewing bounces
Summary
4
Setting up phpList with Popular Publishing Platforms
Setting up phpList with Popular Publishing Platforms
Integrating phpList with Drupal
Integrating phpList with WordPress
Integrating phpList with Facebook
Summary
5
List, User, and Administrator Management
List, User, and Administrator Management
Individual user management
Managing lists
Creating a list
Managing administrators
Summary
6
Personalizing E-mail Body
Personalizing E-mail Body
Enhancing messages using built-in placeholders
Personalizing messages using member attributes
Sending messages to subsets of lists based on attributes
Using message templates
Summary
7
Measuring Effectiveness of Newsletters
Measuring Effectiveness of Newsletters
User tracking
Click tracking
Examining advanced user/click-tracking statistics
Summary
8
Securing phpList
Securing phpList
Changing the admin password
Confirming correct filesystem permissions
Confirming htaccess restrictions are in place
Securing admin pages with additional (htauth) password
Summary
9
Advanced Features
Advanced Features
Advanced bounce handling
Domain-based e-mail throttling
Adding attachments to messages
Automatically repeat messages
Auto-generating messages from RSS feeds
Setting up processing automation
Summary
10
Hacking phpList
Hacking phpList
Substituting user attributes in the subject line
Sending system messages as HTML instead of text
Creating a messages archive page
Sending messages using your e-mail client
Summary
11
Troubleshooting and Maintenance
Troubleshooting and Maintenance
General fault diagnosis
Common errors and warnings
Creating a backup
Upgrading phpList
Where to find more help and information
Summary
Index
Index

Setting up processing automation

Now that we are able to manually send messages and process bounces, it would be handy to be able to automate these actions so that they happen at regular intervals.

Requirements

The requirements are as follows:

  • Access to Cron—for automatic phpList processing, we'll need access to schedule jobs on our server using cron entries. Your provider may have made this available using a control panel and it may be called something like "scheduled tasks", or "automated tasks".

  • Filesystem information—we'll also need to know the filesystem path to our phpList installation, the user our scripts will run as and (potentially) the path to the PHP binary. It will also be helpful to have shell (SSH) access to our host.

Customize the CLI "wrapper"

Before we can use the scheduling tools to set up automated phpList processing, we need to customize the "wrapper" bash shell which we can run on our host, that'll do the CLI-based phpList work.

phpList's source code includes a bin...

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