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.
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.
phpList is a popular open source e-mail campaign manager, sporting a powerful web frontend, a rich message editor, and an advanced feature set. We start with a basic configuration and finish with a full-featured e-mail management engine.
You will work your way up from the installation to advanced topics such as bounce automation, user and click-through tracking, and integration with third party publishing platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, Blogger, and Facebook.
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 an e-mail publisher who wants a robust and powerful engine to manage their small-to-huge e-mail distribution empire.
Chapter 1, Installation and Configuration, discusses installation and basic configuration of phpList.
Chapter 2, Setting up Subscriber Forms, talks about creating forms to capture subscribers' details, preferences, and so on.
Chapter 3, Setting up E-mail Bounce Handling, includes automatically managing and reporting on permanent and temporarily bouncing e-mails.
Chapter 4, Setting up phpList with Popular Publishing Platforms, describes the integration of phpList with Drupal, WordPress, and Facebook.
Chapter 5, List, User, and Administrator Management, talks about managing users, admins, and lists and the Performing bulk actions (import/export).
Chapter 6, Personalizing E-mail Body, includes using attributes and variables to customize e-mails received by subscribers.
Chapter 7, Measuring Effectiveness of Newsletters, describes tracking open and click-through rates, and reporting on the overall effectiveness of each message.
Chapter 8, Securing phpList, discusses how to ensure you have basic protection from spammers, brute-force attacks, and misconfigurations.
Chapter 9, Advanced Features, talks about advanced bounce / message handling, RSS and file attachment, automatically repeating messages, and process automation.
Chapter 10, Hacking phpList, is about adding extra functionality and features by modifying or adding to phpList code.
Chapter 11, Troubleshooting and Maintenance, discusses common errors and maintenance tasks.
While phpList will technically run on a wide range of systems, this book has been written with the "ideal" environment in mind - a Linux hosting platform running Apache, PHP, and MySQL (this is the common environment offered by online shared or dedicated hosting providers).
You will need write access to such an environment, as well as the ability to transfer files to the hosting environment. Shell access to your hosting environment would also be useful, but not essential.
This book was written using phpList 2.10.12 as a basis for screenshots and tutorials. In future versions of phpList, user interface elements may change, including layout and text, and additional features may be introduced.
This book is aimed at content creators and distributors who want to "up their game" to a full e-mail distribution engine.
Further, more it will certainly appeal to you if you are technically inclined and would rather "roll your own" system than use an off-the-shelf product.
It is assumed that you are familiar with the basic concepts of e-mail, editing text files, and managing remote files with FTP / SFTP.
The more advanced topics will teach you how to get your "hands dirty" in some of phpList's open source code.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Open admin/subscribelib2.php and search for spambot."
A block of code is set as follows:
define('USE_DOMAIN_THROTTLE',0);
define('DOMAIN_BATCH_SIZE',1);
define('DOMAIN_BATCH_PERIOD',120);
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
define('USE_DOMAIN_THROTTLE',0);
define('DOMAIN_BATCH_SIZE',1);
define('DOMAIN_BATCH_PERIOD',120);
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
Process bounces: /path/to/bin/phplist –p processbounces
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on add new to start adding attribute values."
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.
If there is a book that you need and would like to see us publish, please send us a note in the SUGGEST A TITLE form on www.packtpub.com or e-mail <[email protected]>.
If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.PacktPub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.PacktPub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/support, selecting your book, clicking on the errata submission form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded on our website, or added to any list of existing errata, under the Errata section of that title. Any existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.
Piracy of copyrighted material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works, in any form, on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.
Please contact us at <[email protected]> with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.