future direction

hm, something went wrong with the indentation, I'll fix it tomorrow, rly need to get to bed

Fixed indentation and converted all tabs into double spaces as per http://drupal.org/node/318

added wrong one

Started integrating the messages backend, preliminary version can be found at http://seutje.be/mine/phplistbackend.zip

Things will prolly split from this project now, as my setup is pretty specific, using taxonomy term to name the phplist message and then exposing a form where nodes can be tagged to be added to that message, then a view is constructed, taking that message's tid as an argument and only showing the tagges nodes.

Don't worry, the integration of the backend (just messages for now, but maybe the majority of the backend in the future) is still very specific to my use-case at the moment

I'd first want to finish that before I turn it into a more generic solution. Reason I made the backend a separate module right now is because I can imagine that some people would like to keep the backend in phplist, but still be able to sync drupal users and stuff, so I figured, maybe it's best to keep it as a submodule to phplist

but: I would prefer the backend module to just be the UI that uses functions which are in the regular phplist module. Thinking of stuff like phplist_save_message($msg), which would work pretty much the same as node_save, pass a $msg->id and it'll assume ur editing one. Then of course, you would also need a phplist_load_message($id), so you could do the following easily:

$msg = phplist_load_message(5);
$msg->status = 'submitted';
phplist_save_message($msg);

and ur message would be queued

unfortunately, I think about 6/10 phplist installations is hacked beyond repair, so the functions should be as generic as possible. But that also makes me think to just integrate it all... like the way you currently handle anonymous users registering trough drupal is just (excuse my language) rubbish. If a language other than english is used or if the thank you message is changed, it simply pretends to break, when it really doesn't break, so there's definately room for improvement there, at least add an option to set the thank you message that's returned by phplist, and maybe even completely migrate the whole process of signup to drupal, up to the sending of the confirmation message

that would make it way easier to turn phplist into a mean, lean, multilingual machine :P

enjoy your vacation :)

dev update:

- added 'add message' form
- added func to easily map (active) lists and associated messages
- using taxonomy as identifier for which nodes should be added to the message
- added dependency on date_popup (part of date_api) for the senddate

I don't think any1 will be able to use this version, as it is still way too specific for my use-case, but once I get it running properly and tested, I'll get working on a generic solution
Functions and workflow need some work so I can use 1 function for saving and editing

latest (11/05/09): http://seutje.be/mine/phplistbackend-6.x-1.x-dev.tar.gz

I'll attach it aswell

getting a bit further in the development of this... but I was wondering if it wouldn't be more interesting to put my _message_load and _message_save functions in the base phplist module so the rest is just a ui on top

this is what I'm currently using to load up messages and their associated lists

/**
 * Returns an array of phplist messages as they are in the database, optionally filtered
 */
function phplistbackend_get_messages($msg = array()) {
  // Grab the phplist prefix array
  $prefix = _phplist_dbconn();
  // Prefix will return false if the phplist settings were wrong
  if ($prefix == FALSE) {
    return FALSE;
  }
  // When the phplist settings are correct
  else {
    // Build the query
    $query = "SELECT * FROM {%s}";
    $placeholder = array ();
    // get the phplist prefix and append messages to get the messages table
    $placeholder[] = $prefix['prefix'].'message';
    // if an array was passed
    if (count($msg)) {
      // append status filter to query
      $query .= " WHERE";
      $count = 0;
      foreach ($msg as $key => $value) {
        if ($count > 0) {
          $query .= " AND";
        }
        if (!is_numeric($value)) {
          $query .= " %s = '%s'";
        }
        else {
          $query .= " %s = %d";
        }
        $placeholder[] = $key;
        $placeholder[] = $value;
        $count++;
      }
      // showing 20 results for filtered requests
      // TODO: pager and maybe views-like exposed filters, perhaps use views for building this
      $limit = 20;
    }
    else {
      // if no status was passed, show only 10 results
      $limit = 10;
    }
    // add order by modified date , showing last modified message on top
    $query .= " ORDER BY modified DESC";
    // use phplist database
    db_set_active('phplist');
    // run the query, keeping in mind we want to add a pager in the future
    $results = pager_query($query, $limit, 0, NULL, $placeholder);
    $messages = array();
    while ($result = db_fetch_array($results)) {
      // stuff results in messages array
      $messages[] = $result;
    }
    // add the lists for each message
    foreach ($messages as $id => $message) {
      // check plain
      foreach ($messages[$id] as $key => $value) {
        $messages[$id][$key] = check_plain($value);
      }
      // building query
      // get the name and id of the lists that belong to this message
      $query = "SELECT list.name, list.id FROM {%s} as list, {%s} as lmsg WHERE lmsg.messageid = %d AND list.id = lmsg.listid";
      $placeholder = array();
      // populate placeholder with list table name
      $placeholder[] = $prefix['prefix'].'list';
      // populate placeholder with listmessage table name
      $placeholder[] = $prefix['prefix'].'listmessage';
      // populate placeholder with message id
      $placeholder[] = $message['id'];
      // execute query
      $results = db_query($query, $placeholder);
      while ($result = db_fetch_array($results)) {
        // populate the message lists array with the results
        $messages[$id]['lists'][$result['id']] = $result['name'];
      }
    }
    // set active database back to default
    db_set_active('default');
    return $messages;
  }
}

this returns an numbered array of arrays with all values escaped, like this:

$messages = array(
  0 => array(
    'id' => '22',
    'subject' => 'foobar',
    'fromfield' => 'Foobar <foo@bar.com>',
    ...
    'lists' => array(
      '22' => 'my awesome list',
    ),
  ),
  1 => array(
    ...
  ),
)

I might throw in a module_invoke_all right before the return so we can use a hook_phplist_load_message or something so other modules can easily manipulate message on load

just keeping u posted :)

EDIT:

forgot to mention, to filter messages, simply pass in an array as parameter specifying anything (xcept lists for now), for instance:

phplistbackend_get_messages(array('id' => '27'));

will get the message with id 27 (if found ofc)

or:

phplistbackend_get_messages(array('status' => 'draft'));

will get all the messages marked as draft

or:

phplistbackend_get_messages(array('template' => '8'));

will get all the messages that use template id 8

of course you can combine these:

phplistbackend_get_messages(array('status' => 'sent', 'owner' => '2'));

will get all messages with status "sent" and owner "2"

actually, this a just an implementation of the phplist backend, since it depends on the phplist module, there's no comparing to be done :P
might even move some functions to the main phplist module, coz it has a better "position" to function as an API for other modules

simplenews on the other hand, is a totally independent module that doesn't require a 3rd party package and like the name suggests, is a lot less feature-rich in comparison to phplist

btw, currently finalizing the message handling for my specific use-case, then I'll form this into a generic module that can use regular messages, RSS feed lists and HTTP_Request style fetching based on a view of nodes tagged with taxonomy like I did

when I'm done with that, I might integrate the statistics reporting with a dependency on the graph module or something... we'll see :)

got some more time to work on this, current version can be checked out from http://github.com/seutje/phplistbackend

allows u to set a content type as being a newsletter, when enabled, keeps track of which node id (drupal) is connected to which newsletter id (phplist), sets the subject to that of the node, uses site email as from address, sets the newsletter body to the URL of the node and adds proper userselection based on language
when the page is getting fetched, both preprocess_page and preprocess_node will have an extra $vars['phplist'] that will be TRUE when phplist is fetching it and FALSE when phplist isn't the one fetching the page. (so any page.tpl.php or node.tpl.php have a lil checker var called $phplist)

that module sorta relies on #903356: Easy language mapping for the language mapping though

oh cool, thanks.

I'm still working on a clean way to send test versions from drupal for which I might just rip the sendEmail function right out of phpList and convert it

was also thinking it would be nice to get some stats in the drupal backend, possibly with some fancy graphs, but there's no client demanding this, so it might take a while before I get to any of that

sorry, I'm no longer using PHPlist, so I'm no longer actively developing the backend integration module.

I'll just copy/paste what Paul said in #17

When the PHPlistbackend module is installed, it adds an extra option to the "Workflow settings" group when you edit a content type. "Send as a newsletter".

If you set this to "Enabled", when you create or edit content of that type, you will have extra fields on the form which allow you to send that node as a PHPlist message.