Chapter 49. Sending an e-Newsletter

PHP-Nuke contains a very rudimentary administrative module for sending e-newsletters to your members. Select Newsletter from the Administration menu, and you'll see something like Figure 49.1.

Figure 49.1. Sending an e-newsletter.

As you can see, you provide a subject for your newsletter and then the content (which should not include HTML tags). You can elect to send it only to those users specifically subscribed to your newsletter or to all of your userseven those who have not asked to receive it and those who have specifically requested that you not send it to them. Obviously, I don't recommend the latter, unless you have a bona fide "darn good reason" to be e-mailing all of your users.

PHP-Nuke sends the e-mail by querying all of your users' e-mail addresses. It then goes into a big loop, sending the e-mail to each one, one at a time. If you have ten users, it takes about 5 seconds to do, or maybe even less. A hundred users might take 2530 seconds. And that's where the problem sets in: Most Web servers are configured so that PHP pages can execute only for 30 seconds. Afterward, the page is terminated, meaning only the first hundred or so users receive an e-mail newsletter.

Another problem is that the newsletter can contain really only text; PHP-Nuke doesn't encode the outgoing e-mail to contain HTML. You can put HTML in there, and most mail readers will figure it out, but it's not the "proper" way to do it. Also, sticking HTML into a text e-mail is something a lot of spammers do, meaning your outgoing newsletter might be tagged by some spam filters and some of your users might never even see it.

So what can you do? Well, as of this writing, I'm not aware of any add-on newsletter modules that fix the problem. The only solutions, then, are awkward, mainly involving exporting user e-mail addresses from PHP-Nuke and into a third-party bulk mailer application (which you may have to pay for), a process that's so cumbersome you'll try it only once before giving up in disgust.