Hey all,

I'm a little behind on the release schedule, because I want to also
announce a project to get multiple fields in Dada Mail sometime this
decade It's fairly apparent that:

• I won't get a client that wants to drop all the money to get this
  feature in
• I cannot take the amount of unpaid time to make it happen myself,
  without gambling my own well-being *ie: working for free for a month
  makes me very low on money!)
• Lots and I mean, LOTS of people want this feature in and are
  willing to give a little

So, I'm whipping up a proposal on what I think is a good starting
point for the multiple fields feature and am going to start
collecting funds via the http://fundable org project, since it's
exactly what I'm looking for: it has a feature that if the goal is
not met, everyone gets their money back

If this works, I don't see why we can't have one project, like the
multiple fields project, going at one time I think everyone wins in
this situation :) I could think of a boat-load of projects, including:

• Better mass-sending routines - auto pickup of dropped mailouts,
  better reporting on what the problem may be, etc

• Bounce Handler that works on a points-based system: one hard bounce
  = 5 points, one soft (mailbox full, for instance) 1 point, 10 points
  to get auto-unsub'd,

• Fleshing out dada_bridge

• Rewriting the digest to actually work with one list, instead of two,

• Mambo/Joomla/[insert popular CMS here] integration

and many others :)

This is the rough draft of the proposal Feel free to comment on
it I would like to start out with KISS and then have more bells and
whistles

Dada Mail and Multiple Fields

The #1 Requested featured in Dada Mail is the support of multiple
fields

The problem:

Currently, Dada Mail only supports the saving of an email address in
its subscription database This makes things very simple, but has
become quite limiting on what you can do with the program

Three scenarios:

Scenario #1

You may want to personalize an email message, so as to make it seem
you're talking to the subscriber personally For example:

 Dear [first_name],

 I hear you like [favorite_food]! Well, at my store we have
 many different varieties of [favorite_food]! We're going to
 be having special cooking workshops coming to: [city],
 [state] and would like to know if you're interested in
 attending these workshops
 As always, they're free and  you
 will receive many interesting cooking tips and recipies for,
 [favorite_food] Please see http://example
com/request
html
 to RSVP your attendence

Scenario #2

You are in a rock and roll band You are awesome You would like to
announce your impending arrival on your tour dates - but only right
before you visit each city on your tour Common sense tells you that
emailing out an announcement every day would anger everyone that's
not seeing you If you had the option to only email out people living
in, say, New York City one day and Philadelphia the next day,
everyone would be happier

Scenario #3

You are a starving artist You use email list software to announce
most of your shows For very special dates, you like to have a
physical mailout in postcard form You'd like to keep track both
email address and physical address

These three (simplified) scenarios above would benifit GREATLY from
the use of multiple fields

Customizing These Multiple Fields:

There will need to be a new screen in Dada Mail's control panel that
will let you add/edit/remove fields I propose that this be as simple
as possible, mainly that the only thing you can set when adding a
field is the name of the field itself The field could then contain
any kind of information you'd like

I propose the program also be equipped to create the HTML
subscription form code you'll need to use with Dada Mail - It will be
bare-bones, but you can tweak the HTML form code in a real HTML
editor to your liking - for example, if you want a form widget to be
changed from a simple text box to a radio button group who's values
are, 1 or 0, you can easily edit this yourself

All fields, except the email address, can be marked optional/required

At the moment, fields will not be set by type - meaning, a field will
NOT know if it is a zip code, or a phone number, or a Sir Name That
may be added later

Using The Multiple Fields:

E-mail announcements and newsletters can then be sent selectively
depending on the subscription options selected at the time of
registration

This can be done in the, "Send a List Message" screen by simply
having a new part of the form specifically for the new fields - each  field will have a labeled text box next to it that you can enter your
search terms into

If the search terms matches the subscriber's information, the
subscriber will be sent the newsletter message It may be a good idea
to have a preview window, so you can see exactly who's getting the
message It may also be a good idea to have simple options by each
form so you can do a little more of a fuzzy search - for example, if
one of the fields is a zip code, it would be nice to have a option to
have a, "starts with" option you can check, so, "802" would match,
"80205" but not, "06802" Currently, sophistocated geo-spatial
searches will not be supported - meaning, you will not be able to
say, "send to everyone 10 miles from Denver, Colorado

All subscriber information can be exported to a delimited text file
(Tab, CSV)for use in Microsoft Excel or another database program
This same format can be used to import information into Dada Mail

New Subscribers can enter the information required in a form with all
the fields that need to be filled out - once they filled it out, Dada
Mail will handle the form and make sure all the fields are correctly
filled out -

 * If they're not, Dada Mail will say exactly which fields need  

to be changed and present the form again to be amended This will
repeat until the form is filled out correctly

 * If they are filled out correctly, Dada Mail will either send a  

confirmation email if one is needed, or just subscribe the email if
none is needed

 * The confirmation process will work exactly as before

I am hoping to raise an amount of: $1500 to cover my time creating
this project This number is indeed low for implementing such a
feature in a program My goal is not to gouge the users of Dada Mail,
but to be realistic that such a feature will take much time and
resources and to admit that I, personally, do not have these
resources to cover this feature myself - ie: I have to eat, too! I
stand by my track record of releasing Dada Mail for 6 years free and
continuing to support and develop the program to its current state

Deployment:

Fundraising will take Six Weeks, or until the necessary amount is
received I'm hoping that a working implementation in beta form will
be released for public use in six weeks after the start of such a
feature

This modified version of Dada Mail will be available to all, for
free, under the terms of the GNU General Public License - the same
license that Dada Mail is currently covered under

Constraints:

The Multiple Field feature will only work if you set up Dada Mail
using one of the SQL backends - either Postgres or MySQL - it will
not work with a PlainText backend If your hosting account supports
an SQL database, you should be fine - the majority now do (not so
when Dada Mail was first developed!)

So, that's what I've been working on and we're going to start once
the new release is out!

Cheers,