i'm looking for newsletter solution for my customers, but i'm little bit confused which strategy to choose. the requirements are: 1. let anonymous surfers of the client site just to enter there email address if they want to subscribe the newsletter. 2. be able to see in the backoffice all the subscribers email addresses (nice to have feature - export them to file) and of course send them mass mail.
as far i can see from reading posts here (maybe i'm missing something) there are 2 common strategic to do that:
1. use Tim Geyssens mail engine package (that looks great) or similar package - but it can only send mass mail for members? can't i use this package to send mass mail for non-members? i dont want to force the anonymous subscribers to become members.
2. use thired party service like mailchimp and embed the subscription form on my site.
am i missing something? what do you think is the best solution for this requirement?
Use a third party! Mailchimp, Campaignmonitor and others have years of expertise and have built great services for you to take advantage of. They also do everything they can from keeping your newsletters from arriving in somebody's spam folder, something which is very hard to achieve on your own.
The return on investment from struggling on your own and finding out all of the problems that are involved with sending e-mail will essentially be a negative.
Recently a simple package was released that takes advantage of the mailchimp API to send sign-ups to mailchimp.
i chekced mailchimp and its looks great. they even have lifetime-free acount with limit of 500 subscribers and 3000 emails in months, and thats fits my client requirments.
sebastiaan i think you are right that the third party solutions are the most professional, but still, i'm hopping to see in the future from umbraco some more out of the box basic features like mailing list (newsletter), calendar etc. i'm also shure that with community like this the umbraco future will be great!
Eran, it not going to come out of the box. Umbraco is a content management system and has very little "extra" functionality out of the box because that is not the focus of the core team. Granted, calendar events can be considered content, but sending newsletters not really.
Umbraco developers should be prepared to write custom code for their custom needs and will have to rely partly on the community building packages for it.
I'm sure Niels can explain this much more elegantly than I can, but this is the gist of it (and it's not going to change any time soon.. ).
sebastiaan probablly you are right - maybe sending newsletter is too much for a core feature.. ;-) i agree that the core team should focus on building the core functions and a set of tools, api etc. the other community members should take care of the rest.
what i mean to say is, that today there is a lot of packages - some of them great and handle one subject almost totally (small example: xslt search and imagegen) and some of them less - and as a newbee in umbraco - i'm feeling that i have to collect little bit from that and little bit from there and install a lot of packages that handle a lot of things and of course also make modifications and development as needed.
i think it will be great to have a set of "base"/"recommanded" packages that will take care of all the non-core-but-common features like newsletter, calendar etc. i think that a lot of people and newbees would be happy to know that if they choose umbraco - there is already solution to the most common tasks. i think that the core team should develop this "base" packages (and sell it seperatlly in a reasonable price) OR supports and incorage independent/commercial package developers that will develop "base" packages. i know that you already supports every package developer - but i mean that you/we/Niels need to define this goal as a strategy. (the goal: one short list of recommended packages that handle common tasks like events, calender, search etc). of course it will than be easy to upgrade short set of this semi-official packages to future versions compitability etc. by the way, i think that most of the work already been done - because we already have great packages and great community!
Newsletter best practice?
i'm hope this is the right forum to ask this:
i'm looking for newsletter solution for my customers, but i'm little bit confused which strategy to choose.
the requirements are:
1. let anonymous surfers of the client site just to enter there email address if they want to subscribe the newsletter.
2. be able to see in the backoffice all the subscribers email addresses (nice to have feature - export them to file) and of course send them mass mail.
as far i can see from reading posts here (maybe i'm missing something) there are 2 common strategic to do that:
1. use Tim Geyssens mail engine package (that looks great) or similar package - but it can only send mass mail for members?
can't i use this package to send mass mail for non-members? i dont want to force the anonymous subscribers to become members.
2. use thired party service like mailchimp and embed the subscription form on my site.
am i missing something?
what do you think is the best solution for this requirement?
Thanks!
Eran.
Use a third party! Mailchimp, Campaignmonitor and others have years of expertise and have built great services for you to take advantage of. They also do everything they can from keeping your newsletters from arriving in somebody's spam folder, something which is very hard to achieve on your own.
The return on investment from struggling on your own and finding out all of the problems that are involved with sending e-mail will essentially be a negative.
Recently a simple package was released that takes advantage of the mailchimp API to send sign-ups to mailchimp.
i chekced mailchimp and its looks great. they even have lifetime-free acount with limit of 500 subscribers and 3000 emails in months, and thats fits my client requirments.
sebastiaan i think you are right that the third party solutions are the most professional, but still, i'm hopping to see in the future from umbraco some more out of the box basic features like mailing list (newsletter), calendar etc. i'm also shure that with community like this the umbraco future will be great!
Thanks,
Eran.
Eran, it not going to come out of the box. Umbraco is a content management system and has very little "extra" functionality out of the box because that is not the focus of the core team. Granted, calendar events can be considered content, but sending newsletters not really.
Umbraco developers should be prepared to write custom code for their custom needs and will have to rely partly on the community building packages for it.
I'm sure Niels can explain this much more elegantly than I can, but this is the gist of it (and it's not going to change any time soon.. ).
I can recommend the excellent pdcalendar for calendar events by the way.
sebastiaan probablly you are right - maybe sending newsletter is too much for a core feature.. ;-)
i agree that the core team should focus on building the core functions and a set of tools, api etc. the other community members should take care of the rest.
what i mean to say is, that today there is a lot of packages - some of them great and handle one subject almost totally (small example: xslt search and imagegen) and some of them less - and as a newbee in umbraco - i'm feeling that i have to collect little bit from that and little bit from there and install a lot of packages that handle a lot of things and of course also make modifications and development as needed.
i think it will be great to have a set of "base"/"recommanded" packages that will take care of all the non-core-but-common features like newsletter, calendar etc. i think that a lot of people and newbees would be happy to know that if they choose umbraco - there is already solution to the most common tasks. i think that the core team should develop this "base" packages (and sell it seperatlly in a reasonable price) OR supports and incorage independent/commercial package developers that will develop "base" packages. i know that you already supports every package developer - but i mean that you/we/Niels need to define this goal as a strategy. (the goal: one short list of recommended packages that handle common tasks like events, calender, search etc).
of course it will than be easy to upgrade short set of this semi-official packages to future versions compitability etc.
by the way, i think that most of the work already been done - because we already have great packages and great community!
Thanks!
Eran.
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