Nobody?? 8|

Without hacking b2e, you could use phpList to do the job.

It's a third party mailing list manager that users can subscribe and unsubscribe to. It also manages bounces and failures.

The best feature (which I have yet to try - but need/want to) is an RSS parser. It will read an RSS file and send any new posts to your list. I don't know all the details on it's RSS feature, but you can find more here:

http://tincan.co.uk/?lid=453

Hope this helps.

Awesome man,

This is precisely what i'm looking for for my own site. Despite what many of the threads in here say about mailing lists being dead (to which i disagree) ;) this is still an important feature in a blogging engine since alot my my non-geek friends are quite happy with email and don't "get" (nor do they really want to at this point) RSS feeds.

I too am stoked about the RSS parser. That IMHO is all that person needs for this.

Thanks again for positing the link.

Brent.

I think it's the development cycle that's a little dead right now, certainly not the requests for email notification mailing lists. Hopefully they'll get more developers soon. I don't envy anyone working on the product right now but the number of requests for this feature meeting no you don't really want that feature, use this instead or join the development team responses doesn't make for a happy day for anyone.

With a product like this, timing and responses can make or break its success. Movable Type tripped up due to its own attitude and dropped the ball, leading products like Wordpress and b2evolution to come to people's attentions who never heard of it (raises hand). I switched and encouraged others to as well. However I did not realize at the time that b2 lacked email notification nor did I see that it was a widely asked for feature that somehow never made it into the product. Upon looking back at old posts on this board alone, it's been asked for continuously by many people over a long period of time. Most responses are 'want to join the development team', or 'just use RSS' (unacceptable), or 'oh mailing lists are dead no one uses them any more' etc etc etc.

I understand it's rough being a developer, with everyone expecting everything from you and in the confusion it seems like no one cares, wants to help or are being picky. But certainly the people asking for this feature, for more than a little bit aren't being picky. We ALL want this product to succeed, pick up more and more adopters and become the next standard in blogging software. I like this product! We all like this product or we wouldn't be using it. But it's not going to be the next MT if it doesn't have at least ALL the comparable features MT has and more, if important feature requests take too long to make it in or people scan the messageboards to see the responses to feature requests that have appeared here.

I hope that we all understand that everyone here wants this product to succeed. The stakes are high and I'm sure the development team feels it. I can't help but feel they are too few in number right now and coming at what I believe to be a crucial time for b2, who knows what's going to happen at this point. I do want them to know that we do appreciate them and that by displaying our concerns as to its development they don't get the misinterpretation that we don't care or are being ungrateful as to their efforts. We all want to see this effort reach the skies!

Consider this a request to not clog b2evo with a mailing list feature. I hope if the dev team does add one they make it be an easily removed plugin of some kind. That way it, much like the language packs I'll never use, will get deleted from my installations. Personally I'd rather see the dev team put their efforts into permissions by group and functions, richer stats information, and maybe something like the ability to ban comments with urls from specified IP addresses. I'd also like to see the skins be more universal so that hacking your _main will apply to any style sheet selected versus obligating the same hack across all _mains.

Push systems (aka mailing lists) are exactly that: pushy. That's why the spammers love them: you have no control over what gets SENT to your inbox. Given that people think they can't avoid spam they feel they have to dedicate resources to filtering and blocking spam, or the horrible 'white list' nonsense. Unfortunately those resources can and do fail, and spammers are always looking for new ways to defeat them and continue pushing. Once your inbox is full you don't get email anymore, so you better download often! Oh and you better check your email when you're on vacation just to make sure it doesn't clog with emails that will be old by the time you get home again. If you don't guess which emails you lose? That's right - the new stuff! This is why the (overly enthusiastic) geek community sees email lists as 'dead' despite the fact that aggregators just aren't ready for prime time.

I remember the first time I heard "DOS is dead" from people all pumped up over this new windows thing. I thought 'yeah right'...until I checked out windows. DOS was dead - it just took a little while for the corpse to stop kicking. Where have all the 8 inch diskettes gone? How about the "new mini 5 and a quarter inch" disks that replaced them? What's up with computers now not including a 3 and a half drive? It's road kill on the shoulders of the information super highway, and mailing lists will end up there. Eventually.

One more thing: b2evolution will not lose ONE SINGLE PENNY if this 'feature' never corrupts the file structure because it is COMPLETELY FREE SOFTWARE. Product development and market timing just don't apply to something done for the pleasure of coding a quality product.

All points being considered, some people run blogs that have pretty active communications going in the comments, almost as much activity as a forum. Some users, perhaps authors too, want to be notified of replies, while others would rather check the comment actvity for that post on their own without email notification. So, if a plugin or feature to the core is produced to allow email notification of a reply to a comment, it should be optional for each user to request if they'd like to receive an email at the time they leave the comment. This feature would benefit the core package.

As for a mailing list for new posts and such, I agree that this should be a 100% plugin - downloadable seperately from the core package. This feature would be nice for some, but it's not a necessity for a blog to be a blog. A mailing list plugin could take on a life of it's own and become a seperate project easily.

I know the b2e dev team is busy with their lives, day jobs, vacations, and such - they warned us before the summer that things would die down during july and august. I'm excited to see what they have in store for us for the next release. It's felt this way for a while, but v1.0 really is right around the corner.