Writing software is hard. Writing good software is really hard. We really think Dada Mail is pretty awesome software and we plan to continue to develop it, as we have been for the last nine years now. But, we can always use some help. So, we've put together another fundraiser, to help offset the costs and time it takes to get these features into Dada Mail and have them be just as awesome as the rest of Dada Mail.
Click Here to Make a Pledge To The Fundraiser!
Like we've done in the past, we're using Fundable to manage the fundraiser. What's cool about Fundable, is that we can set a goal and if we don't reach it, everyone gets their contribution back.
We're trying to fundraise $1,000 to put in the most popular (by your vote) feature into Dada Mail.
To give you a little more incentive on contributing, we're going to pledge the following:
So, that's sounds like a great deal to us! Get yourself and a few of your closest friends to donate and all of you could potential get Pro Dada for a sweet price.
We're also going to add the total purchases for Pro Dada made for the next 30 days into the total funds raised, to allow more features to be added. Note! though, we'll still have to make the first goal, above, strictly from the Fundable fundraiser to start.
Vote For Your Favorite Feature Here!
We've compiled a list of what we think would be some pretty cool features to put into Dada Mail and grouped them into good-sized chunks.
We'd like you to vote for which feature you'd like to be added to Dada Mail.
(You do not have to contribute to the fundraiser to vote, but it would sure help in getting the feature developed!)
The most popular feature will be added to the program. Every time we reach another milestone (another $1,000 raised), we'll use that to fun the next popular feature. We'd like to add every single feature listed, if possible, during this fundraising, if that's possible - and we're pretty optimistic we can do that - with your help. ALL the features we'll add will be available in every version of Dada Mail we released - these aren't features that are only for Pro Dada!
In some of these examples, we've added a quick mock-up, to give you a better idea on what the feature could look ad work like. these are most likely to change, when finalized (and hopefully, from feedback from everyone)
Currently, Dada Mail supports adding/editing/deleting of arbitrary subscriber fields.
It also supports the list owner logging into the list control panel and editing the subscriber information, on a per-subscriber basis.
Dada Mail currently does not support the actual subscriber to edit it's own subscriber information and we'd like to add that feature into Dada Mail.
This would also mean we'd have to overhaul the session management part of Dada Mail to not only support admin sessions for the list owner, but to also support sessions for individual users.
Once completed, individual subscribers will be able to edit their own subscription information, add/edit/remove themselves from mailing lists their subscribed from and view other meta information about their current subscriptions.
We'd also like to have more advanced web-based features available for subscribers, once logged into Dada Mail, including the option to posting and replying to discussion list messages from within your web browser, having the archive accessible to subscribers only.
Currently, multiple fields only allow you to set a name and fallback value, per field.
We'd like to extend these features to include various meta-data about the field itself. For example, we'd like the option to allow you to set if a field is optional or required and what sort of HTML form field should be presented to the would-be subscriber, when they fill out the form itself.
There's currently no way to preview a mailing list message, before you send it.
We'd like to add one that works really well and is incredibly easy to use.
We'd like this previewer to allow you work well with the subscriber fields and the advanced Dada Mail templating language, so you can see exactly and instantaneously what your advanced if/unless/loop blocks do to the customized message you're creating.
Currently, the moderation system is slightly less than rough. It works, but is a little kludgey. We'd like to make it much more easy to use, extendable and convenient.
Currently, The options for moderation look something like this:
Fairly spartan.
We'd like to extend the functionality to include:
All these features should take off much of the burden of moderating from the list owner and spread it to specific moderators, as well as being able to opt for a self-moderating list.
Dada Bridge is really missing digest support. Digests should be able to be automatically created and sent to a ``digest'' sublist. This sublist should also be able to reply to the sublist, and join in on the discussion. Currently, this doesn't happen.
Being able to save a set of your subscribers, based on a saved query of your subscriber fields would be incredibly helpful to help keep track of various activities of your mailing list.
Smart Groups can be created/edited/delete and Smart Groups can be used to view a specific part of your mailing list.
Currently, it's not very easy to work with a Dada Mail mailing list from an outside application. A SOAP API will allow a platform and language neutral way to access part of the Dada Mail API.
Some major subsets of the Dada MAil API that could be useful in the SOAP API include administration duties, such as Sending a List Message, adding subscribers en-mass, import/exporting a subscription list and handling archived messages.
The SOAP API could also be useful to add features of Dada Mail into your own application that deal with individual users, such as validating a subscription and subscribing/unsubscribing a subscriber.
We're hoping to work on the server-side part of this, with a fully documented API and hopefully, a very simple client example.
The Click through Tracker plugin currently tracks the following:
We'd like to extend the tracking to include Subscriptions and Unsubscriptions.
We would also like to have the addition of graphing features in Dada Mail, so you can graph the data that's saved in the clickthrough tracker logs in practically any way you'd like.
Currently, there is no installer for Dada Mail - you have to, albeit minimally, edit Dada Mail's source file's manually to get Dada Mail installed.
Installation should be as easy as uploaded the files to your hosting account, changing the permissions of one or two files and visiting a script in your web-browser that will then go through the steps needed to complete the installation process in a wizard-style, step oriented way, much like applications, like Joomla, Wordpress or Moveable Type.
The installer should be able to configure Dada Mail using any of the backends, including any of the SQL backends, as well as some of the plugins and extensions that are included in Dada Mail, but currently have to be installed separately of Dada Mail itself.
Most all HTML in Dada Mail is separate from the actual Perl code, but it's still not as accessible as it could be.
We'd like to have the template files completely separate from the Perl program part of Dada Mail to allow easier editing and theming. Instead of the template files almost hidden far in the program itself, they should simply be in a directory you upload into your public_html directory on your hosting account.
This would also allow a much richer application experience, as currently, images cannot be used in Dada Mail in a big way for layout and design.
We'd also like to make a web-based editor for these templates.
Finally, we'd also like to make all Email Message templates exist outside of the Dada Mail program code an as easy to edit as the HTML screens.
We're also pledging that we'll ship (at the very least) a beta-version of Dada Mail, that includes the feature fundraised within a month, a month at a time. So, if there's two features that we've raised funds for, we'll release one version of Dada Mail with most popular feature included and then, in another month, we'll release another version of Dada Mail with the next feature included. Make sense?