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Plugin Description
This plugin is a fork of poMMo, an open source newsletter project that’s been publicly dormant for a while but has been a source of coding pleasure for me since I found it back in 2005, around the time Matt and the gang were releasing Duke. Today, it’s integrated into WordPress via the Top Quark architecture and forms the basis for a powerful contact management tool.
Newsletter Engine
As a newsletter engine, poMMo offers the following useful features:
- Throttling – most web hosts only allow limited amount of emails to be sent per hour. Find out what your web host allows and then set the throttle in poMMo
- Templating – save your newsletter as a template, or just save it as a draft to return to later
- Personlization – include the recipient’s first name, or anything else you track
- Groups – create and use groups to filter your list
- HTML & Plain Text – emails are properly formatted to include both versions
Contact Management Tool
poMMo is easy to use to keep track of a customizable set of data for your subscribers. It’s easy to add new fields, turn fields on/off (determines whether they appear on the signup form) and reorder fields. It’s also easy to create complex groups that will search your contacts based on a variety of matching criteria.
Beyond that, it is possible for plugin developers to develop add-ons to the main poMMo plugin that can customize the database experience in just about any way they want, including adding extra admin pages, changing the look of any of the admin or user pages. Using these techniques, it’s possible for an organization to segment their list into different contexts. For example, a non-profit organization might have a general email list and also a list of volunteers. It’s possible to have poMMo track them all, restrict access on a user-by-user basis to which records they can edit. It’s also possible to create a Read Only version of the database, preventing people from making unwanted changes while still giving them access to the data. I’ve written several such add-ons for different clients and will release them as examples of what can be done. The division into contexts is available via a Premium plugin called poMMo Plus that will be available from topquark.com shortly. I’ve also written an add-on that allows you to send to your list using MailChimp.
Unlike other email list programs, poMMo can handle contacts that don’t have an email address, and it can also handle multiple records being associated with the same email address (via a “Parent Email” field). Both of these features are turned on by default.
Invitation to collaboration
The original poMMo project had several developers working on it. I’m releasing this here in hopes that it piques the interest of open source developers out there with a desire to take this product to the next level. Here’s a brief roadmap of improvements that I think can be made:
- Integrate with the WordPress user database (right now they are separate, but to be a proper WordPress integration, they should be one and the same)
- The HTML mail editor is a separate installation of TinyMCE. It would be good to make it run off of the WordPress version
- Bounce handling. You’re able to specify an address to send bounces to, but at this point it does nothing with that
- Along those same lines – enable a “post as email” feature to allow a post to use shortcodes and other WordPress features
- Integrate with other third party email service providers (iContact, Vertical Response, etc)
- Maybe you have ideas on things you’d like to see. Get in touch at topquark.com
Screenshots
No screenshots provided
