Gutuma Newsletter Management / News: Recent posts

One of the major short-comings of simpler newsletter systems is that messages are sent out in one lot, so you are limited by how much you can send. With this in mind, the mailing system in 1.6 has been redesigned so that sent messages are saved to an outbox, and deliveries made in batches. You can manually send batches, or configure a cron job to send batches at regular intervals.

Other new feature in this release include drafts, and an install/update framework which will make future releases much easier to rollout.

It was going to be 0.8, but by the time I had finished it, I'd pretty much included every feature I had envisaged when I started this project. The major new features are email attachments, and automatic welcome and goodbye messages for new and former subscribers.

Where next? There are a few more minor features which will be arriving soon (see the todo list in the change log), but after that I’m considering whether or not to start using a MySQL database, as currently it will become increasingly challenging to add advanced features without hurting performance. Perhaps I can make it optional.... read more

Gutuma has changed a lot in the last few weeks - I've had a lot of free time to work on it and its almost become the program I set out to make. Only a few major features are missing - namely message attachments and automatic welcome/goodbye messages. Those will hopefully appear in version 0.8, which with a bit of testing, should hopefully become the first stable release.

If you are using Gutuma please email me or leave a post in the forums and tell me how its working for you, and what you think would be useful features for future releases.

This new version signifies the fact that Gutuma is now working functional product. Give it a go and see how easy it is to use! Like for instance - other newsletter tools require you to specify for each user if they should get html or text emails, or you have to choose one format when you're making a new message. Gutuma automatically generates the text version from your html version, and lets you check it before the email is sent.... read more

I suppose I could have called this project "Yet-Another-Newsletter-Tool-In-PHP" but instead I picked Gutuma which means "to send" in Kirundi. So what's going to distinguish this project? Hopefully the high ratio of functionality to ease-of-use. Currently Gutuma doesn't use a database which makes the installation process as simple as uploading. I'm also aiming for minimal required configuration, whilst still giving advanced users the control they want. I also want this to have the look and feel of a commercial product. All the design is controlled with CSS so it can be easily themed.... read more