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ctnlist version: 1.3.2
Administrator: Richard Catto
You can now log into this site and manage everything from your profile. Try it now!
ctnlist was written to replace phplist which I previously used from mid 2006 till end of January 2009. Although phplist is very popular and widely used, I had constant problems with it that hampered my operations and did not make working with my mailing list a pleasure. I found that phplist would slow down after sending a few messages, experience frequent database corruption, lose track of subscriber status, distribute messages very slowly (often taking several hours / days), not finish sending messages, fail to display message sending statistics in a reasonable time etc. Typically, ctnlist will take 30 minutes to send a message to over 50 000 subscribers, something which would take phplist well over 12 hours to accomplish.
In January 2009, I decided to write my own mailing list system in PHP and MySQL from scratch. The first version was implemented as a monolithic php5 class that handled every aspect of a mailing list. An interim internal release (1.1) which was never published to the general public, added a captcha facility to the subscribe form to stop bots mindlessly subscribing garbage addresses to the system.
In August 2009, I released version 1.2 which refactored the code into discrete classes for each mailing list entity, such as message, subscriber, template etc. An autoload function was provided to include the required class file, so the developer does not need to keep track of class dependencies.
In January 2010, version 1.3.1a was released which added a user login and profile system, plus many other features. Version 1.3.2 will be released shortly. It will add the ability to customise the web site design used to display ctnlist's output by changing only a few template files.
Currently only one mailing list is supported per installation, however, each list can be effectively sub-divided into 30, by utilising the interests subscriber facility to allow a subscriber to receive only those messages which match their chosen interests.
Every email that you add to this system's database is never deleted from the database. When a subscriber unsubscribes, they are flagged as unsubscribed rather than deleted. This is so ctnlist can ensure that someone who wants off, stays off, which saves you from spam complaints.
The bulk subscribe feature does not re-subscribe subscribers who have previously unsubscribed or been bulk unsubscribed. To re-subscribe an address, the individual subscribe form must be used.
When a reader uses the forward link to send the message they received to a friend, ctnlist has two functions you can choose from to perform this action. One does a normal forward only, the other forwards the message and also subscribes the new address to the database, which helps to grow your list. You decide which function to use.
Ctnlist is double opt-in which means that a subscriber is sent an email with a link to click to confirm their subscription.
Features:
- Automatic message archive creation
- Forward and Subscribe
- Message is sent only once to a subscriber
- Tracks when messages are read
- Simple template system
- Templates for both html and text parts of a message
- Edit templates and messages using CKeditor
- Very fast sending using the Swiftmailer engine
- Stable
- Small database footprint
