Codito ergo sum
This weekend was rather productive - quite a change from the norm then :) Since Friday night I've been busy coding away in PHP. I have to admit that it was stuff for work (when will I get around to adding some more features to BlogSmart?) but it's been quite a bit of fun.
The first item was a XML RPC server to allow one of our clients to add users to our systems. I made use of the XML RPC implementation by Keith Devans
Keith has a great implementation there and in no time I was able to offer the service. It's not 100% live at the moment as it does not integrate with our live system. That's mainly due to the fact that our server in Cape Town does not open up to the Internet much so it has no services other than SSH exposed. So our public web server will have to do the deed and we will just sync stuff over to the local box.
At least my experience in coding BlogSmart helped a little there ;-) Now I'm trying to think of what other methods I could expose over XML RPC.
The next project was a PHP Mailing List manager. At the moment we've got 2 newsletters that we need to send out but our current software only supports sending the emails out in HTML format. For a while now I've had to manually send out the text only versions of the newsletter - fine seeing as there are only 50 subscribers for the text version but it's bound to grow and I do have better things to do with that 1 1/2 hours!
My main goal was to make the application easy on the eyes and simple to use. Think I've covered both of those aspects so far (well it does look nice with loads of icons :) ). You're able to
- Create lists (and a list could be either TEXT, HTML or TEXT/HTML)
- Add subscribers to a list
- Send emails to a list
It seems to be able to do what I need but I still need to add in
- Mail queue management
- POP3 checking to handle list commands (subscribe, unsubscribe, suspend)
- Reporting
- Email confirmation
But at least I should be able to add those 50 people to the database and not have to waste ages doing it manually.
Will run with the code for a while and maybe upload it if anyone likes. It's using the PEAR::Mail_Queue facility so has built-in queuing.