Managing Your Email Campaigns with phpList | 2

Managing Your Email Campaigns with phpList [con't]

Subscribe Pages

Very often, you need a mailing list for a service that you are providing via a website and you would like the mailing list pages to match the look of the website. To style your phpList pages, you need to create a new subscribe page. You can do so by clicking on subscribe page in the menu and then add a new subscribe page.

You can have multiple subscribe pages and offer different lists on each page too. Specify the title of the page and give a brief introduction. To style the page, you need to enter the markup in the Header and Footer sections. Remember that in the header, you need to close the head tag (</head>). Before closing it, you can include certain additional files that you need, but you can't define the primary tags such as <title>, etc.

The header and footer that are defined here will also be used to style the other pages such as the Thank You page and the Unsubscribe and Preferences page.

Hacking phpList

There are a few email campaign management features that I find quite useful, but unfortunately phpList doesn't have a graphical interface for all of them as yet. Sometimes you need to look under the hood and change the source code.

Configuration Page

PhpList allows you to customize several things such as the sender name and email address for the messages that are sent out, the thank you message that appears after a user subscribes to one or more of your lists, and the footer that is appending to all messages (containing the unsubscribe link, etc.). To modify these, go to the configure page when you are logged in as Admin. You will find several settings that you can modify there.

Automatically Confirm Subscription

Sometimes, you want to confirm a user's subscription automatically. Unfortunately, phpList doesn't have this as an option under the configuration page. You need to hack the code to achieve it. Open lists/admin/subscribeli2.php and look for the following string:

Replace it with the following:

This will confirm the user automatically when he subscribes. Try it out. You will see that the user gets automatically confirmed, but she still receives the email to confirm her email address. To solve this, you can either reword the Message users receive when they subscribe to welcome them to the mailing list in the configure page, or you could suppress that email from going out.

Don't Send Welcome Mail When a User Registers

To suppress the email that is sent to a user when she registers, open lists/admin/subscribeli2.php and look for the following string:

Replace it with the following:

This ensures that the welcome email is not sent to a user.

Remove the "Powered by phpList" Image from Emails

To remove the Powered by phpList image from the emails, open the config file (lists/config/config.php) and look for:

Change 0 to 1. Save and upload the file to your server.

Conclusion

That wraps up the installation and configuration of phpList. As you can see, it's extremely easy to set up, but when it comes to configuring it to your needs, it can be hard. It works beautifully when configured, but I think it can definitely do with a facelift. If you need any help with phpList, the best place to turn is the phpList Forum where people are extremely helpful and often prompt.