suggestions for a community email package

community would submit emails, and I notify them of changes

[schulerlab]

I am working on a website for the parents of high school choral students and the students, and any choral involved other members of the community.

The website contains descriptions of the different departments of the department, but is mainly focused on whatever activity is presently going on or will be going on. It is very event driven, volunteer driven, etc.

is there a package that I can use that will allow parents to enter their email address, so that they can be notified of any upcoming events, or changes to the website?

It would be nice, too, if I could allow other board member to enter their own announcements, then mass email it to the subscription list. However, this is not necessary (I can enter it for the time being).

thanks.

[rogerd]

I'd search hotscripts or other repositories for "mail list managers" or similar and see which packages have the features you need. The size of your list will be a major factor. If it will grow to tens of thousands, then speed of operation, automated bounce handling, etc. become important.

Other features to look for are opt-in management (to avoid people who sign others up without permission), easy unsubscription options for the user, good bounce handling, flexible user data fields (if you need them), etc. I use a hosted Lyris manager for one good sized list (tens of thousands) and it works fairly well.

[schulerlab]

thanks for your suggestions.

I looked at Lyris Manager, and it looks nice, but this is a volunteer type website, with no income, except parent donations. so, I'm looking for something free, if simple.

I will look at hotscripts.

Thanks.

[rogerd]

How big is the list, schulerlab?

[schulerlab]

Hi, Roger. I am not sure how big it would be.. but I would imagine not over 300.

The thing is.. I don't know. and the reason I don't know is because in the previous 2 or 3 years they've had the site, it has always been broken. so, parents quit coming. Which is why I volunteered to take it over while my son is in chorus.

I've fixed it, and parents are coming back.. but I have no idea of how many people are interested in updates. You have kids in split families, extended families, and also friends, and people that donate to the department. so.. kind of hard at this point to figure out what the user base is.

I looked at hot scripts.. zip.

so, I think I might pick up the NMS formmail script and just write a simple mailist myself. I was hoping not to have to do that.. I can't believe there isn't something out there already. Hate to reinvent the wheel ;)

I was also thinking there might be an addon to wordpress, something else I was thinking of installing for the board so they could add their own content directly. but I haven't found much on that either.

:(

[rogerd]

For a list of a few hundred, something like Lyris would be huge overkill. I've used someting called PostOffice Pro for very small lists like this, but I think they are defunct. It worked pretty well for lists under 1000, but didn't handle bounces. While your list is small, manual bounces handling is probably OK.