Question

PHPList for sending email

Answer 1

PHPList has the following characteristics:

- Accept RSS feeds from our website
- Supports more than 100,000 subscribers
- Allows HTML templates
- Creation of lists: you can segment the mailing by cities, events, products, etc.
- Allows to have a record of shipments and be aware of errors, shipping times.
- Make imports or exports of entire lists of email txt or csv.


To install PHPLIST we must first download it from the official website www.phplist.com , after unzipping it you can upload it to your server via ssh or ftp.

You can create a directory within your domain www.mydomain.com/phplist and you must also create a mysql database. Then you look in the /config/config.php directory, to configure the database and the routes to the web defining the following constants:

 $ pageroot = '/ phplist'; $ adminpages = '/ phplist / admin'; 

Then we will access the administrator of the website www.midominio.com/phplist/admin for the first time and will show us an error message "Error: The database has not been initialized" , but it will give us the option to initialize it, we will click on "Initialize database" and execute the sql code, where all the tables and phplist configurations will be added. If this fails or gives an error TYPE = MyISAM you should edit and change Type for ENGINE to make it compatible with mysql 5.0 or higher, I have installed the file phplist.sql from phpmyadmin

Now if we can enter as administrators with the default user admin and the phplist key.

How to import contacts and mail in phplist

The import format is text or cvs (exported from spreadsheet) separated by semicolons, the format of the fields is as follows:

email ; name; last name; address; telephone

(son inventados los datos): The format seen from a text editor would be like this (the data are invented):

[email protected]; Carlos; Perez; Madrid 1233; 99667755
[email protected]; Jose; Perez; Barcelona 1322; 99988766

Before creating a newsletter you must go to the config.php file and define if you are going to use phplist in test mode or for real shipments, for this you must look for the line of code defined ("TEST", 1) ;, if it is in 1 it is test mode and not send mail will only serve for tests and simulations, if you put it in 0 you will leave the sending of emails activated.

One visited by the administration panel

The phplist administrator panel has many options, to create users, perform database maintenance, configure the shipping in time and quantities, the language of the interface, Tabien we will generate a password for the admin to validate and make statistics with the emails

In message functions we have the option to create a bulletin in html and in text.

In addition, we must define the user lists to which it will be sent, the start date of shipment and various shipping filters.

When the shipment begins we will see in the message panel we can see the shipments in progress, here we can see some examples that includes phplist.

You can also follow up with Google Analytics, or with some options like click tracking that comes with phplist.

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