[consulting] Current state of newsletter systems

[Mark Hope]

I had a quick look over Civimail and I agree it does look quite a 
beast. I certainly think it would be overkill for my current needs.

The user base of the site I'm currently working on will only distribute 
to a few thousand at the most - and the client need to have control of 
creating the content so a (simple) Drupal solution is required. For the 
time being I'm going to apply a few of the patches under simplenews and 
do the customising with the theme template. This doesn't address the 
multi-part sending I was looking for but I think simplenews does 90% of 
what I'm looking for.

I do use Campaign Monitor and the idea of a Module that uses the API 
sounds great to me. If you get past the 'toying' idea I'd certainly 
consider donating ideas, testing time and cash.

Thanks to everybody for the feedback.

Mark


On 27 Nov 2006, at 20:23, Scott Trudeau wrote:

> Civimail is a weighty beast -- doable if you are/have a good sysadmin
> and root on your boxes and willing to handle postmaster issues
> (getting whitelisted with major ISPs, etc.)... but for high volume
> mailing, if you can afford it, I'd look for a hosted solution.  I know
> Gaiahost has some Civimail experience and I think CivicSpace is
> testing hosted Drupal/CiviCRM/CiviMail right now...
>
> I've heard some folks *cough*Advomatic*cough*  have code that
> integrates Drupal/CiviCRM in some fashion with some major list hosts
> (ConstantContact, Topica, etc.) but I don't think there is anything
> public.
>
> I'm toying w/ the idea of building a module to integrate specifically
> with CampaignMonitor only because their API is so nice and neat.
> There's probably some "right way" metathinking about how to abstract
> this all out but that's more work than I'm willing to do. :)
>
> Scott
>
> On 11/27/06, Boris Mann <boris at bryght.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 11/27/06, Mark Hope <mark at markhope.net> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Just wondering what the current state of the various newsletter 
>>> mailing
>>> systems are?
>>>
>>> I've looked at simplenews but it is what it says - Simple. I'm sure
>>> that's what the author intended, however I'm sure there must be a 
>>> wider
>>> demand for a more feature rich mailing system?
>>>
>>> The features and issues queue that would make Simplenews more 
>>> complete
>>> doesn't seem to be moving very quickly.
>>> I think the UI for simplenews is good, but the outgoing mail and
>>> formatting I find quite poor.
>>
>> It's unlikely that simplenews will (or should) evolve to  anything 
>> more
>> complex.
>>
>> There are entire projects dedicated to newsletter setup and send out. 
>> I
>> would suggest that this is a non trivial task, especially if you want 
>> to
>> send out high volume to lists (although you could use Drupal to send 
>> to an
>> external distribution list).
>>
>> So, short answer, I don't know of anything being developed right now, 
>> and
>> it's a big job to get done right. There is CiviMail -- see
>> http://civicrm.org/civimail -- which integrates with CiviCRM / 
>> Drupal. Don't
>> know how optimized it is for the HTML + header/footer that you're 
>> looking
>> for.
>>
>> --
>> Boris Mann
>> Vancouver 778-896-2747
>> San Francisco 415-367-3595
>> Skype borismann
>> http://www.bryght.com
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>>
>>
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