I'm thinking of working on a plugin to allow communities to also be used to manage a mailing list. Basically, I want community owners to be able to send out a 'newsletter' (via email) to anyone who is a member of the community. An Elgg admin could do the same to any individuals, groups, or all users.
Just thought it would be good to put this out there in case anyone has already done something similar or would like to help out. If so, please let me know.
./tim
Keywords: mail, newsletter, plugin
Comments
It sounds like a great idea, and I'm not aware of anyone writing anything similar.
As all users need to have a valid email address, you could simply get a set of addresses through a single database call joining to the community membership. Then in the simplest case all you'd need is a page that only the owner could see, that would allow them to type / preview / send a message and maybe keep an archive.
I think a lot of people would find this very useful.
I'll give it a shot. I've always disliked mail list management tools out there, as the are hard to intergrate with other system.
Once the improvments you have mapped out for community membership (owner can add users, communties can change owners) then I think basing the mail list off of community memerbship will work.
./tim
Hey Tim;
I'm going to write something like this for our installation. First round is probably just a checkbox saying 'email blog post to community.' If you have any code put together now, or in the next week or two, let me know. Otherwise, I'll start on a copy myself.
Here is a very rough (but working) build - use with caution!
http://elgg.org/plugins/files/-1/155/newsletter.zip
Access from "News" account, administrative area.
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