I'm develloping a joomla 3.0 site with community builder and fabrik 3.1 for a sport club. With fabrik I've created several lists of users (e.g. junior members, senior members, male senior members etc.) based on community builder fields. Now I'd like to mass mail to the users of a list from the front end. I tried the List - Email plugin but no succes untill now. So I'm desperate for some help. Does anyone use fabrik for mass mailing or newsletters? And how?
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Mass email or newsletter using a fabrik list
- Thread starter iSchnappi
- Start date
jfquestiaux
Well-Known Member
I have not done it yet, but working on a similar project. My intention is to use Acymailing along with Fabrik (no community extension in my project) to handle the newsletter sending. Acymailing has an API through witch you can add a new subscriber to existing lists, so you can include that code in a PHP plugin that is run onAfterProcess of your registration form (assuming it's made with Fabrik).
Thanks for your reply jfquestiaux, but I'm trying to work aroud newsletter extensions. Point is all newsletter extensions require a unique email address. Of all users with the same email address, only one is recognized as a newsletter member. And since many of my users have a shared email address acymail or jnews are no option for me.
The members of my tennis club are sometimes very young. And sometimes whole families are a member. And my joomla site is my membership administration tool. So each member must be a joomla user. With some core joomla editing (tricky but it works) it's possible to register all users, even users with a non-unique email address. Only problem is I'd like to send emails to specific groups of users based on gender, age etc. These groups I can create with fabrik. Now I need to find a way to their mailboxes.
The members of my tennis club are sometimes very young. And sometimes whole families are a member. And my joomla site is my membership administration tool. So each member must be a joomla user. With some core joomla editing (tricky but it works) it's possible to register all users, even users with a non-unique email address. Only problem is I'd like to send emails to specific groups of users based on gender, age etc. These groups I can create with fabrik. Now I need to find a way to their mailboxes.
cheesegrits
Support Gopher
Hmmm, the bit which sounds rather dangerous is:
Joomla, and all 3rd party extensions, have been written from day one with the assumption that email addresses for users are unique. The potential for unforeseen and subtle problems by breaking that Golden Rule could be huge.
What you *should* be doing, instead of adding users with the same email address, is something along the lines of what JFQ said, which is to use some other 3rd party extension, specifically designed to be a "mass mailer", and using mailing lists to handle who gets what mail.
The problem with "mass mailing" is that it is a VERY specialized task. While Fabrik does have built in mailing capability using a variety of plugins (list, form and cron), we are NOT a "mass mailer". Our mailing plugins are designed to handle relatively small amounts of recipients, measured in dozens, rather than hundreds or thousands.
When I say we are NOT a mass mailer, what I mean is that all we do is fire off a "best effort" send of the mail. We just hand the mail to J!'s built in sendMail() helper, which then uses whatever you have set J! up to use as your mailer. We provide zero features like checking to see if email got sent, or if it got bounced back, and handling disabling of addresses that consistently either don't send, or bounce back.
Those features are important, because not managing your mailing lists properly can very quickly get your site listed on any number of email RBL's (real time blacklists), on the assumption that you are a spammer, as typically they are the only "mass mailers" that keep trying to send to non-existent or bouncing emails.
The consequence of getting on RBL's are basically death to any mass mailing system.
We also don't provide any sort of built in "opt out" facilities, which are typically required for any commercial "mass mailing" system, so you'd have to roll those yourself.
This is something which we've devoted some thought to over the years, and I currently have some ideas about integrating Fabrik with MailChimp via their new Mandrill API. But that isn't going to happen "real soon", it's something I'll look at adding once we have released 3.1, and are free of the nightmare of having to maintain two huge code trees for J! 2.5 and 3.0, when we can deprecate 3.0, and have just one 3.1 code base that works on both J! 2.5 and 3.0.
Until then, if you want to use Fabrik, I'd look at following JFQ's suggestions.
-- hugh
Joomla, and all 3rd party extensions, have been written from day one with the assumption that email addresses for users are unique. The potential for unforeseen and subtle problems by breaking that Golden Rule could be huge.
What you *should* be doing, instead of adding users with the same email address, is something along the lines of what JFQ said, which is to use some other 3rd party extension, specifically designed to be a "mass mailer", and using mailing lists to handle who gets what mail.
The problem with "mass mailing" is that it is a VERY specialized task. While Fabrik does have built in mailing capability using a variety of plugins (list, form and cron), we are NOT a "mass mailer". Our mailing plugins are designed to handle relatively small amounts of recipients, measured in dozens, rather than hundreds or thousands.
When I say we are NOT a mass mailer, what I mean is that all we do is fire off a "best effort" send of the mail. We just hand the mail to J!'s built in sendMail() helper, which then uses whatever you have set J! up to use as your mailer. We provide zero features like checking to see if email got sent, or if it got bounced back, and handling disabling of addresses that consistently either don't send, or bounce back.
Those features are important, because not managing your mailing lists properly can very quickly get your site listed on any number of email RBL's (real time blacklists), on the assumption that you are a spammer, as typically they are the only "mass mailers" that keep trying to send to non-existent or bouncing emails.
The consequence of getting on RBL's are basically death to any mass mailing system.
We also don't provide any sort of built in "opt out" facilities, which are typically required for any commercial "mass mailing" system, so you'd have to roll those yourself.
This is something which we've devoted some thought to over the years, and I currently have some ideas about integrating Fabrik with MailChimp via their new Mandrill API. But that isn't going to happen "real soon", it's something I'll look at adding once we have released 3.1, and are free of the nightmare of having to maintain two huge code trees for J! 2.5 and 3.0, when we can deprecate 3.0, and have just one 3.1 code base that works on both J! 2.5 and 3.0.
Until then, if you want to use Fabrik, I'd look at following JFQ's suggestions.
-- hugh
cheesegrits
Support Gopher
To put it another way, if you are finding you need to hack on the J! core to do what you want, then you are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
I seriously would suggest you stop and have a re-think of ways you can achieve what you need to do, which fit around the way J! and 3rd party extensions work.
I've been coding for a living for 30+ years, and I've never seen a project which started off with the premise that "we need to hack our environment in order to do what we want" which didn't end in disaster, one way or another.
-- hugh
I seriously would suggest you stop and have a re-think of ways you can achieve what you need to do, which fit around the way J! and 3rd party extensions work.
I've been coding for a living for 30+ years, and I've never seen a project which started off with the premise that "we need to hack our environment in order to do what we want" which didn't end in disaster, one way or another.
-- hugh