Jl4 Newsletter Application

I give you a nifty little Laravel 4 newsletter application. Give it a shot!

Things you can do with it

• Add and manage subscribers (you can import a CSV list of subscribers: first name, last name, email - trial)
• Assign subscribers to lists - which make it easy to manage subscribers
• Send emails to individual subscribers or entire lists
• Track emails
• View email readers' statistics - reads, browsers, platforms etc.
• It also automatically adds an 'unsubscribe' link to all emails
• Please note that the dashboard (stats page) is cached every 30 minutes. So you won't see a change immediately.

Things you should do [Edited]

• Download a fresh copy of Laravel 4.0 into your dev environment
• Use composer install to install its dependencies (see Laravel website for full guide)
• Download and extract the contents of Jl4 Newsletter Application into a separate directory
• Copy the composer.json file from step 3 and overwrite that in step 1 with it.
• Run composer update
• Copy the entire app/ and public/ directories from step 3 and overwrite those in step 1 with these
• Add ,"app/libraries/csvImporter.php", "app/libraries/Browser.php" to autoload in composer.json file after "app/tests/TestCase.php"
• Run composer dump-autoload
• Set up your mysql database with the following credentials (You can change them if you want, just ensure you configure app/config/database.php to match): 'database' => 'newsletterl4','username' => 'newsletterl4','password' => 'RncqKAJGLzw9z87n'
• It will be sending a lot of emails, so ensure you configure your app/config/mail.php accordingly
• Run the migrations included in app/database/migrations or import the jl4-mysql-dump.sql included
• NB: The application needs two users - the first one (added when you run the migrations - by default, myself) is the super admin who receives emails when the other one (added when you setup the site in frontend) fills the 'help' form.
• Once the above is done, go to your new home page from where you will follow instructions and voila!

Many thanks to

• Laravel 4
• Bootstrap 3.0
• Sentry 2 from Cartalyst
• CkEditor 4.2 + CkFinder 2.3.1
• and the few other assets used

Candidates for further work

• Tracking bounces since Swiftmailer only delivers to the SMTP server
• Importing CSV - not very consistent at the moment
• Scalability/performance - the statistics page is currently cached every 30 minutes
• Bugs/minor fixes as they arise

Feel free to use/contribute to it as you wish. In case you need to, @kJamesy me

License

The MIT License