Need Advise re: E-mail Club

[Daria]

Someone, please, advise of a good script (preferrably a free one) or some soft available for purchase out there for a "sign-up to e-mail club" feature for a website.

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I'm picking up some work that fell in my lap, but I am a clueless nOOb :confused: willing to learn, but in need of direction!

[Klyve1]

It depends just how simple you want this to be? You could write the emails to a text file or to a database.

Database is the far superior route and allows for all sorts of other functionality.

[Daria]

I want people to be able to sign-up only. Is there a way for a submitted e-mail to be automatically put into a masterfile that is derived for the e-mail list? (So the mailing list would kind of get updated "while you sleep") I don't know which one would be more appropriate *.txt or DB.

[Klyve1]

Users won't really thank you for only allowing them to subscribe!

Does your webhost support PHP?

[Daria]

Yes, everything is supported, including PHP!

Forgot to mention - it is not intended for mass spam - it is a mailing club for a local small retailer that is mailing out promotions to people who subscribe only. (I think his average list does not run over a thousand people).

Thing is - maybe I misrepresented my goal - I want only "subscribe" button to be posted on the website (that much I can do myself), and have a standard "remove me" option in the e-mails sent to clients. Sorry - yes, I need a standard amount of bells and whistles.

Thanks :)

[Klyve1]

What do you know of PHP and MySQL databases if anything?

This is pretty simple but you do need to have a basic knowledge, even if only for testing?

[Daria]

Right now I only know that it exists! I am sort of going backwards - I'm trying to comb trough some perl (huff), getting familiar with javascript (puff), but I haven't touched the MySQL nor PHP yet. Should I get a crash course? I really need a solution rather quickly. I am not trying to slack off - but its one of those situations: give me "A" now and I promise to study up to it later :)

[Klyve1]

Which do you want, to a dB or to a text file?

I'll write up some PHP for it.

[Daria]

That would be very geneours of you.
If DB is superior - so I'll go in that direction. However, I need to learn it myself, too.

[khalidali63]

Asmentioned above,there are several ways to get this functionality done.
The best way, though, be using the database,

A fw thousand records can be handled using access db,if your company have MS Office,access db is already within your reach.

Then its only matter of choice which rogramming language you want to use to get this done, there is an array of languages that might suite your needs,such as, Java(servlets,jsp), or VB(asp)...and list goes on..

cheers

Khalid

[Daria]

I am definately able to create a simple Access DB. The language as a matter of choice - that's where my problem is - since I don't know much about them, how can I make an educated choice?

[Daria]

Do you, guys, think this (http://www.phpnuke.org/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=15) may be what I need?

[Klyve1]

I haven't had any time over the last few days and it'll be a few more before I can put something together but this download is certainly worth looking at - there are lots of these up on the web, check out some of the PHP sites.

http://www.evilwalrus.com/
http://www.phpfreaks.com/

etc

[Daria]

Thanks a bunch :)

[Daria]

Still having problems... My server doesn't allow telnet installations and, sure thing, most of the resources come with "setup" utility that needs to be installed via telnet.
However, my server has an "announcer" I can use. It sends e-mails out, etc, however, the list of names has to be provided by me, so all I need is a little "submit" script that will allow people to sign-up, i.e. will write email address in a plain text file, with each email on the separate line,

qwerty@abc.com
ytrewq@cba.com
qweryt@bca.com

etc.

I know it's gotta be so simple...

[Stefan]

Originally posted by Daria
My server doesn't allow telnet installations

But mayby it allows you to use something more secure like SSH ?