KeepInTouch - Newsletter Tool for Unix / News: Recent posts

It is now possible to create content and campaigns independent of each other. In db-speak, 'content' and 'groups' are independent data-sets. 'campaigns' is a relational databases between content and groups (many-to-many relationships possible)

Some minor changes in latest code submissions are:

- edit campaigns (only sender_name and sender_email)
- sender_name appears in recipient's mailbox
- All content items can be viewed under the "Newsletters" link

Today's code update marks version 2.0, with the significant addition of NL content editing online within KIT itself. sendnl.pl has been upgraded to sendnl2.pl for reading content from the database instead of files as it was previously.

Next release is aimed to allow capability of creating campaigns on webgui, and possibly triggering them automatically.

A Google group for KeepInTouch related discussions is being maintained at:

http://groups.google.com/group/kit-newsletter

For HTML newsletters the subject of the email is extracted from the <title> tag.

For pure text newsletters the subject has to be hard-coded, for now atleast.

This obviates the use of a separate *.subject.html file for both HTML & text newsletters.

PS: suggestions on where best to store subject for pure-text newsletters welcome

In today's update it's been made possible to filter recipient list based on the active/inactive bit.

Also introduced a few finer look & feel aspects - still trying to maintain the simplicity, keeping graphics out and packing lots into a single page. Damn those Google GUI's - they are so inspiring, yet so evasive to emulate!

Coming up next are two things:

1) A newsletter editor based on FCKEditor - so content can be prepared within the KeepInTouch tool itself.... read more

It is now possible to manage multiple mailing lists using the same installation of KeepInTouch. Different address lists are stored in different sqlite database files. Each of these databases has a "test" and "real" version of the address list.

A drop down menu will help to select between the database files. So essentially you use the same forms/masks to navigate/manage the different address lists.... read more

There lingered a bug in 0.2 release which was reversing the f_name and l_name values of new recipient entries. It's fixed now in SVN code and should feature in 0.2.1 release

All application variables have been moved into the kit.conf file. Also a Utils.pm package file has been added to provide general purpose functions like getConfig, sendEmail etc.

It is now possible to link to an unsubscribe.cgi link, which will email you (the admin) about un-subscription

Sample SQL (createdb.sql) has been uploaded for creating a clean database. This can be used when you want to use Keep It Alive for multiple NL projects and create new empty SQlite databases.