phplist members import

[Webrunner]

Hi,
I am looking to incorporate phplist in my website since it has more functionality.
Is there a way to connect the smf userdatabase to phplist?
Is there a rss- or xml feed of the memberdatabase?

[SleePy]

Webrunner,

Have you looked in the bridges section of the forums yet? There may be a bridge.
As far as I know there isn't a RSS or XML feed of the member database.
But certainly could become a mod if anyone is willing to code it. You can ask that in coding discussion.
Can I ask what or where psplist is? I quickly google searched it but didn't come up with anything useful to help me out with your question.

[Webrunner]

Webrunner,

Have you looked in the bridges section of the forums yet? There may be a bridge.
As far as I know there isn't a RSS or XML feed of the member database.
But certainly could become a mod if anyone is willing to code it. You can ask that in coding discussion.
Can I ask what or where psplist is? I quickly google searched it but didn't come up with anything useful to help me out with your question.

Sorry, typo

Of course it is phplist

And yes i used the search option

[SleePy]

Well I downloaded it and looked at the sql file for installing. The database is very messy. I see at least 4 different tables just for user information
It may be possible but I don't even know where to start to import a user correctly. One way though maybe might work is to do a diff on the database exports.
Set it up. When you are ready to add a new user add 1 user. Export the database. Then add another user and export the database again. Do a diff on those. It might help on figuring out what needs to go where to add a new user correctly.

btw. Is there something wrong or not working right with SMF's newsletter feature?

[Webrunner]

Phplist has lots of better features for segmentation, templating and measuring of opens and clicks in the emails. It is just much more sofisticated.

It also has a feature with wich you can import users via a RSS feed (xml).
There are also several plugins like phpbb, joomla and wordpress ( see this page)

Creating a members RSS feed is probably the easiest solution.

[SleePy]

Well I don't remember where I got this but I do have a sitemap.php that generates a XML formated file. I quickly modified it and striped everything out but the members section that pulls member information.
This could be tweaked to perform the correct input it needs.

Does it say how the xml file needs to be formated or what type of information needs to be included?

[hobox]

I'm trying to do the same. Was this ever resolved?

[Oldiesmann]

Webrunner or hobox, do you still need help with this?

[Webrunner]

Yeas.. alhough i am also looking into the newsletter solution of smfhacks.

[MrPhil]

The big advantage of PHPlist (over SMF 1.1.x) is that it can throttle emails being sent out, so you stay under your hosting service's caps. My understanding is that SMF 2.0 has this built in.

I've only looked it over briefly, but PHPlist can import CSV files (comma or tab separated fields) to create or augment mailing lists. Besides the email address, it can contain other data fields that PHPlist can use to decide who gets mailed to. I don't know how complex the decision-making process can be, or if they can be used in a "mail merge" capability (e.g., "Dear %FIRST_NAME%,").

The $64 question is, how do you export your mailing list from SMF? I've looked through the SMF code a bit, and it looks like one could hack the newsletter mailing list code to write addresses to a file, or one could write a standalone utility to read the smf_members table and make a CSV file. Maybe there are cleaner ways to do it, or a mod already exists?

The crowning achievement would be a seamless interface with no manual labor involved. Perhaps PHPlist could be tweaked to run the SMF address extraction script and import it into a specific group, and then send off the newsletter to that group, all triggered by sending a newsletter to a specific group. As I said, I've only briefly glanced at PHPlist's documentation, but it probably can be done (and may well already have been -- I haven't checked their community discussion forum).

[Webrunner]

phplist has a functiuon to directly connect to a MySql database i think.
(i am looking in to it now)

[hobox]

Webrunner or hobox, do you still need help with this?

Yes


PHPList has an import email from MySQL feature, but I can't get it to work with SMF properly.