X3Photo Gallery Forums

Good question. We will definitely be creating a newsletter-plugin for X3, but it will be based on a 3rd-party newsletter service like Mailchimp. Email newsletters (collecting, managing, authoring and mass-sending emails) is complicated business, and not something we can even dream about doing effectively directly from X3 on self-hosted servers.

Benefits of using a superior 3rd party service like Mailchimp:

• Authoring an email to mass-send requires an advanced (yet easy-to-use) newsletter editor that creates html optimized for email clients.
• You will want to select between templates when authoring your newsletter.
• Easy newsletter list/subscriber management through an optimized interface.
• Newsletter campaign open/click statistics.
• Mailchimp has optimized email servers to send mass-emails, whereas your own SMTP server simply does not have the infrastructure. Even if you setup SPF and DKIM records correctly, your server IP may get blacklisted and or is simply incapable of sending mass emails.
• Abide to modern laws regarding "unsolicited emails", including unsubscribe link and address inclusion.
• Create custom sign up forms (form builder) that can easily be added to your X3 website.
• Mailchimp service is free when you have less than 2000 recipients, which should be sufficient for most small organizations.
• Mailchimp has years of experience in sending emails and making sure they reach the recipient.

* For the reasons above, it should be clear that it's pointless for us to build a full newsletter solution directly into X3.

Getting started
Although we will be adding a plugin to X3 so that you can easily include a newsletter-signup form, you can already get started with Mailchimp in combination with X3. You will simply need to sign up for an account at Mailchimp, and then I will help further to integrate a sign up form into your X3 website, something which essentially is covered here already:
http://kb.mailchimp.com/lists/signup-fo ... ur-website

* There are many other good newsletter services, but we have tested Mailchimp ourselves as a good match.

EHRETic wrote:Do you have any integration hint to start with Mailchimp ? I've tried to integrate a "naked" form, but when I click on validate, it jumps out to another (ugly/blank) page to confirm the thing.

Do you have a reference link? It's a bit hard to understand what you mean "it jumps out to another page to confirm ..." I guess it needs some javascript integration.

I haven't done this myself yet, so can't speak from experience. Maybe I can help.

EHRETic wrote:Also, any news concerning the integration "plugin". This would of course save me a lot of "fails" !!!  :joy:

Not yet, but it's in my list. First X3.24 in 1-2 weeks.

Sorry about the delay ... I could have released X3.24 and then X3.25, but there are some core features I really want to include into this major release. Some of the new features required re-thinking X3 from the core (especially new default custom folder sorting with drag-n-drop), and I don't want to do anything half-ass. It's probably gonna be another 1-2 weeks.  :kissing_heart: