In august and september 2008 I held a questionnaire amongst simplenews users to get a better picture of the use of the module and the wishes of the current users. No less than 60 people participated and as expected the questionnaire gave better insights and helped me to make plans for future development of simplenews.
These are the results of the questionnaire and my outline of future development.
Questionnaire results
The use of simplenews
A typical simplenews user built one or two website with simplenews. A typical Simplenews applications contains up to five newsletters which are sent once per month up to once per week to up to 1000 subscribers per newsletter. Resulting in a total newsletter output of up to 100K emails per year.
Use of existing features
Frequently used:
- Newsletter subscription
- Subscription block
- HTML newsletters
Rarely used:
- Multilingual newsletters
- Priority per newsletter
- Receipt request per newsletter
Newsletter block settings:
A large majority uses only some of the block settings or doesn't use the block at all.
Requested features and funding
Major topics for future development:
-
Bounce handling
Support for bouncing email addresses, Overview of bounced addresses, easy block/unsubscribe/remove addresses which bounce.
-
Email statistics
Statistics of received emails (bounce), opened emails, clicked links. Alternatively support for google analytics.
-
Flexible target lists
Be able to send newsletters to an arbitrary selection of email addresses. For example use email addresses in a view as a target for a mailing. Flexible system to (re)send a newsletter to a collection of emails.
-
Collect subscriber data
A method to collect data from subscribers at subscription and by importing subscriber data. Data to be collected must be flexible as CCK. Data must be collected for both anonymous and subscribed users.
Subscription data such as source of subscription and (un)subscription date. -
Subscriber management
Ability to manage large number of subscribers. Search options, mass edit/delete/block.
Funding of future development:
The above new features are highly requested but only a small number of people are willing to fund these developments while on the other hand the commercial interest in this functionality is high. Therefore I like to I challenge the community of simplenews users to work together on these subjects. Those who want to supply code are requested to contact me directly or put in in the simplenews issue queue. I like to coordinate development efforts, participate in it where funds are available or work on your project if it requires the above functionality. Together we can make it happen!
Short term development
- Move advanced options to a collapsed fieldset on the node add/edit form (done).
- Simplify the newsletter block settings and permissions (done).
- Increase the theming options of subscription block (done).
- Improve the (possibilities for) integration with other modules
Long term development
- Improve support for large number of subscribers
- Improve debugging and reporting of sent emails
- Change interface for sending newsletters
- Develop additional modules for additional functions:
- Bounce handling
- Email statistics
- Flexible target lists
- Subscriber data
- Subscriber management
Reacties
A typical simplenews user built one or two website with simplenews. A typical Simplenews applications contains up to five newsletters which are sent once per month up to once per week to up to 1000 subscribers per newsletter. Resulting in a total newsletter output of up to 100K emails per year.- Thank you
this is really interesting
zusatzinstrumente
I'm very surprised to see that no one requested the feature of personalization, meaning the option to include subscriber details in outgoing emails. For example, greeting the subscriber by name, or referencing their join date, UberCart purchases, or other data.
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