Major Additions - Newsletter (Forum Activity)

Sorry no more free time.........

ChrisTERiS
PHP Freelancer
*** Compatible with vB.3.8.x ***

1.- What's this?

With this AddOn you can sends Newsletters to your Members, informing then for the latest activity in your forums.

2.- Features

• Custom Header/Footer
• CSS file to change the look and feel of the newsletter
• Add a Custom Greeting
• Mark a Post as Important to include the full text of this post in the Newsletter
• Latest News/Announcements
• Latest Sticky Threads
• Latest Popular Threads (most replies)
• Latest Threads
• Include a sidebar (PRO version)
  • Member Info (even with the amount of the unread emails (PRO version)

• • Special Member (Give a userid to promote a user) (PRO version)
  • Top Members (PRO version)
  • New Members (PRO version)
• Schedule One-time Newsletters
• Schedule Reccurings Newsletters (PRO version)
• Preview Newsletter (Test email)
• Add Advertisments to Newsletters (PRO version)
• Exclude Advertisments from specific Usergroup(s) (PRO version)
• Bounces Emails
• Blacklist Emails
• Relay Emails (Send a message even from your mobile) (PRO version)
• Newsletter Archives (PRO version)
• Send Emails using Mail() function
• Send Emails using Sendmail (PRO version)
• Send Emails using SMTP (PRO version)

3.- Installation

• Upload all files from the upload folder to your vB directory
• Import product-newsletter.xm
• Set the General Settings
• Set the Mailserver settings
• Set Newsletter Options
• Schedule a Newsletter and test it.

4.- Copyright

• All outgoing newsletters are having a copyright link in the footer. You're not allowing to remove this line (The PRO version is without this copyright line).

5.- Important Notes

1. You need to set a dedicated email address for bounce emails (from email) which you'll never access with any mail client. Doing it, you'll download the emails, and thus, they'll never preceed from the system.
2. Most cheap GoDaddy hosting plans are not having the Mail() function enabled. If this you, sorry but this mod will not works in your site.

Chris

[Christos Teriakis]

I'm updating my site to latest vB version plus making some changes. Please come back in about 24h. For now you can only register at:
http://www.christeris.com/forum.php

Chris

[cdoyle]

Sorry to ask so many questions;
But I just created my first newsletter, and scheduled the send:
On the schedule newletter button it said "To Send: 2240" "Sent 0"

So I ran the crons, and now on the scheduled newsletter there is nothing showing as anything schedule. But I never got the newsletter, and when I check the cron log for Newsletter bounce and Newsletter. They both come up with no matches found. So I don't think they actually did anything.

Any ideas to what I'm doing wrong?

[Christos Teriakis]

First and most important. Are your hosting provider allows use of Mail() function? eg GoDaddy does not allows it. The free version sends messages only with the use of Mail(), while the Pro supports sendmail() and SMTP.

Second. How it works. Lets say that you've schedule to send it at: 01:00 on March 04. At that time the cronjob will build the newsletter with the current forum content and store it in database. After finishing it, another cron will start sending messages in packages of xxx messages per cycle according to your settings.
This is the way that it works, and works for sure.

Chris

[cdoyle]

I was able to get it to work this time, not sure why it didn't the first time.

Had a couple feature requests for you to consider:
The first, is for the popular threads. If there was a way to select a date span would be great. Right now, it's must be going by just the post count and it's finding threads from 7 years ago. If we could have a date span, we could set it to display popular threads from the last month or since the last newsletter went out.

Another feature that would be nice is the ability change the buckets around. For example, be able to have the latest threads bucket display first, and then the popular thread bucket.

Thanks!
Chris

[MagicPID]

Do you plan on making a vb4.1.x version?

[1320Nation]

Can someone please shows an example HTML code to use for the Header and Footer templete?

Show me what you used and cross out your site address if you need to. I keep getting red X's and white boxes with the code I've been using. Thanks!

[Christos Teriakis]

Originally Posted by psychobike

Can someone please shows an example HTML code to use for the Header and Footer templete?

Show me what you used and cross out your site address if you need to. I keep getting red X's and white boxes with the code I've been using. Thanks!

A very simple example. Please note that if you want to add images you must write the full URL to the photo.

1.- Header

<html>
<head>
<title>My Site</title>
</head>
<body>
<table width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0">
<tr>
<td width="100%" align="left">
<img border="0" src="http://www.mydomain.com/images/logo.jpg">
</td>
<tr>
<td> 

2. Footer

</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center">
Copyright <a href="http://www.mydomain.com/">SuperSite</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

As I said, this is a simple example. You can use some styling by placing:

<style>

</style>

in head section

Chris

[oldlock]

I just bought the pro version, but there does not seem to be a download link - do you have to do that manually ??

[ericholtman]

How did you buy it? I can't seem to find it.

[oldlock]

The develoers signature image links to the site, but i don't know that the site is working. I have never seen a software purchase system that did not allow the immediate download of the product once payment is made !?