Introduction
This is a very simple and light-weight application for newsletter campaign management.
It is studied to be integrated with other existing websites / web applications, so the installation is really straightforward.
Installation - 3 easy steps
- Upload everything in a subfolder of your web server (i.e.
/newsletter); - Create the database (you can find the schema in the
/dbdirectory); - Modify the
config.phpfile to fit your needs.
Usage and Features
To get started, you can navigate through quick.php. This is the page from
where you can send newsletters by just following 3 easy steps. So, if your
website is www.example.com and you installed this application under a
newsletter folder, you can go to:
http://www.example.com/newsletter/quick.php.
Please note that the root folder is intended to be not accessible
by design. This way you shouldn't even need to have an authentication system!
Every newsletter has an HTML template, that you should create before creating the newsletter itself. Instead you can use the default template. All templates are stored in the database. When you create a new template, you can see a nice HTML editor with a preview that automatically gets updated every time you edit the code.
Placeholders are available during the template creation: you can inflate the users' name and email directly into the markup, among with the site name, URL, the current date and other.
A newsletter can have resources attached: they're usually just images (jpg, png or gif format). These images are treated as web bugs (also known as web beacons: you can read more about them in my blog). This means that the images you upload will be used to track users' behavior. You will know exactly who opened the newsletter, the time and how many times it has been viewed (or, in other words, requested) by every single user.
Another cool feature is that you can manage as many mailing lists as you want: every user will belong to a single mailing list.
Mailing lists can be updated very easily by just copy pasting the addresses in a text field and pressing the update button. If you prefer you can always add one user at a time. Beware that when you delete a list, all users associated to that list will be automatically deleted too.