simplenews vs php list

Hi,

Not sure how to answer this really, other than suggest you try them both. Simplenews works exclusively within Drupal, PHPlist is external, and you can handle non-Drupal users at the same time with it, and it keeps your mail sending off your Drupal server (if you want it that way).

If anyone else want to chip in with reasons why they use PHPlist instead of Simplenews, feel free!

- Paul

Hello,

I've been trying to resolve this dilemma myself. More than a year ago, I was able to setup PHPlist without any major problems and get going in about a day (I'm slow). That was before I even discovered Drupal.

Today, I need to implement newsletter functionnalities for a few of my Drupal projects. After too many long days of work on a Simplenews setup, I'm currently investigating the possibilities of going back to PHPlist, with or without the phplist Integration Module (which I know nothing about at this momewnt).

About Simplenews. For me, a non-programmer, there is nothing simple about Simplenews. And I don't mean to 'attack' its developpers in any way - they do a great job.

First of all, you can't use Simplenews on its own. So what you'lll have to deal with then is a suite of modules (e.g. Mime Mail, Simplenews Template, etc.). Makes learning & setting up more complicated.

Anyway, after 3 days of hard work, I had it working nicely at least on the Drupal side of things. My major headache now is that what looks good on my Drupal website (in nodes & views) doesn't once it's mailed out. Bare in mind, I know little about theming. But that's not all. As I understand it, Drupal does just about everything with DIVs and CSS - a more sphististicated approach. Unfortunately email clients are not as sophisticated as browsers. And for newsletters to render equally well across a wide range of email clients, it appears simple table layout with inline css is more appropriate.

Lots of info on Mailchimp website: http://www.mailchimp.com/articles/how_to_code_html_emails/

At this point, I believe going the PHPlist way is definetely the quickest way to get good results. So I've kinda reluctantly paused my Simplenews dev efforts (I don't like to quit) for the time being because Simplenews is just too time consuming.

Hope this helps a little.
Cheers

p.s. Drupal is very powerfull. But it still lacks the friendly UI mortals like me need to make it shine.

I should add that developing a theme/template for ANY HTML email is a pain no matter what system you use. The various mail clients, web or otherwise, are very finicky about how they render the old school style of HTML required. (See spacing for paragraph tag in Yahoo Mail)

In my experience, if you are going to be sending newsletters to a smallish list of users Simplenews will do in a pinch. However, if you need to tweak settings for fine granularity control over throttling, SMTP usage, or other such features and are probably going to be a managing a bigger list phpList is for you. I don't think either is easy to install, configure, or use initially for non-programmers. There will be a learning curve especially when tweaking settings for either.

There's really no easy in house way to do email campaigns especially if you are sending out a big list without spending some money on more specialized software or using a service like Constant Contact, which by the way, has a Drupal integration: http://drupal.org/project/constant_contact