PHPlist integration

[Carnage]

I've done work with php list before; i'll take a look at what might be involved.

[ewelin]

I am also interested in such a mod and may assist with contributing to development depeding on the feature set.

[SHalliday]

I am very interested in seeing an integration mod developed for phplist and vbulletin. It is something I have wanted to add to my sites for a long time. This would be a great addon for vBulletin and will or donate to someone to develop it, if anyone is interested.

[Alfa1]

People seem to have different expectations of what such an integration should be. This ranges from merely a member integration (i.e. you can send emails to your members) to a complete integration including bounced email management.

I am interested in the bounced email management function as well.

[Carnage]

I'll give an idea of what I had in mind for this - I've not assessed how easy this would be to do but...

• [strike]Use vbulletin user database for auth in phplist[/strike] [strike]This has turned out to be a lot more work than its worth due to functions in phplist not working as documented[/strike] This is back on the list due to a brainwave...
• Allow users to subscribe to lists via usercp
• Keep user data synced between the two programs
• Pass information about bounced emails back to vbulletin

The last item is something i'm interested on views over - My instinct would be to unsubscribe the user from all lists after a certain number of bounces; however what to do on the vbulletin side of things is more tricky - should they be unsubscribed from everything there as well? should a flag be set on the user account? should they be set into the users awaiting email confirmation group?

Perhaps just call a script/function on the vbulletin side that will allow developers to write their own behaviours for this...

[Alfa1]

It depends on the bounce. If it is a permanent error, then move the user into the 'users awaiting email confirmation' usergroup. Otherwise it will only lead to more bounces and email providers banning your website.
Non-permantent errors, should only affect users if there are a number of bounces.

[Carnage]

I guess i'll have to confer more with you once i've got more progress on this.

Currently i've got phplists using vbulletin for authentification; however you have to login to the admin cp first otherwise you can't login. (just an issue with relative paths on the admincp login form)

Were there any other things in addition to what was on my list that you'd consider important?

[Alfa1]

Being able to select members based upon the same criteria, that vb's currently allows for sending email.

A supplementary feature that would be very nice is being able to include dynamic content from vbulletin into email messages. i.e. latest threads from forum x, y, z, blogs, group messages, etc.

[Carnage]

Bit of progress made; i have phplist seemingly happy to use vbulletin admin data instead of its own.

I've also got some level of syncronisation between vbulletin users and the phplist users

• Newly registered users are added (but not subscribed)
• Data is updated if a user changes email (currently left as confirmed thou)
• User is deleted if the vbulletin user is deleted.

Matching is based on email address.

i'm working on bounce handling atm; i'm thinking that the best way would be to stick a cron job in vbulletin to just pull data from phplists and deal with it if need be. It would be very helpful if someone could give me some data from their bounce and user_message_bounce tables so that i've got some real data i can use to create test data from.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

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