Hey Mike,

It appears that for some sites having the users enter a user name, email and select a newsletter format all in one block seems extremely convoluted and an overkill in general. Would you consider maybe adding a simplified block that allows a user to just enter an email addy and format. He may then get registered as a user on the site with some generic username like "user123" - so you don't have to change the underlying tables/functionality - and gets an email that asks him to confirm his email and also informs him that he now has an account which he can use to edit his subscription.

The main issue is that the way things are now, the user sees a huge registration block with all the bla bla text about selecting a username and how his email is gonna be used and a slightly confusing format selection block under that (I know I can remove the bla bla but still). It would be so much more intuitive to have a block that quite clearly signs the user up for the newsletter as the primary function (as opposed to registering him and subscribing to mail as secondary).

Sorry for so much text. Let me know what your thoughts are - I could actually come up with a form for such a block and send it over to you if you'd be interested in adding it to the module.

Cheers,
Martin

Comments

Mike Wacker’s picture

Mike Wacker commented
Status: Active » Postponed

I'm planning to do this after one or two more releases. It's a really big architectural change for SunMailer though, and there's a lot of subtleties and nuances you have to watch out for when you make this transition.

That feature would effectively mark the beginning of the 6.x-2.x branch of SunMailer (and since I haven't synced the 7.x-1.x branch with the 6.x-1.x branch for a long time, the 7.x-1.x branch will probably become the D7 version of the 6.x-2.x branch).

Mike Wacker’s picture

Mike Wacker commented
Version: 6.x-1.x-dev » 6.x-2.x-dev
Status: Postponed » Active

And after the 1.6 release, I've decided I don't want to do another 1.x release and go straight to the 2.x branch

cgillogly’s picture

cgillogly commented

Any idea when the 6.x-2.x version will be released, or if it's at least stable to put the dev release into production? I am implementing SunMailer on a site and allowing anonymous subscriptions is a must.

Mike Wacker’s picture

Mike Wacker commented

I'll create an alpha release when I have something ready. The alpha release would still have some parts missing like role-subscribe and some Drupal account integration features; the focus would be on

  1. Supporting more than one newsletter
  2. Newsletters with only anonymous subscribers

Also, I wouldn't have very strong guarantees in terms of documentation or testing for an alpha release.

Currently I have no ETA, free time has been harder to come by ever since I graduated from college. You can take a look at my commit history in CVS and the current state of the 6.x-2.x-dev branch if you really want to try to get an idea of my progress.

cgillogly’s picture

cgillogly commented

I understand about the free time. I would be willing to help work on the 2.x version of the module. Is there anything specific that would helpful for me to work on and submit patches for? I was already planning on customizing the 1.x series to fit my needs, but with the 2.x in development I would much rather contribute to getting that version completed.

Mike Wacker’s picture

Mike Wacker commented

The biggest need probably right now is making sure the code works. I'm not keeping my tests up-to-date for the alpha version, so it's likely I let a lot of bugs slip through. Anything under admin/settings/sunmailer/mail in the menu is still in progress, but most other stuff is complete.

Mike Wacker’s picture

Mike Wacker commented
Status: Active » Fixed

Fixed in the 6.x-2.0-alpha1 version

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.