email database registration?

[mlegg]

I'm looking for help with trying to figure out how to allow members for an organization to submit their contact info (name, address, phone, email) to us so that we can setup a member database. This will also be used to blast out monthly newsletters to them. I've use Constant Contact before with someone but he already had the emailing list.
thanks

free is great but paid is ok too

[keyboard]

Well if I understand it correctly, you'll need to create the contact form, then use a serverside language (such as PHP) to enter that data into a database. Then you can also use PHP to loop through the database and send out an email.
I can't say I've heard of Constant Contact before.

Do you have much experience in a server side language?

[mlegg]

I don't really have enough knowledge to do it. That's why I asked for ideas here

oops forgot to link to http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp

[mlegg]

if nobody has an idea how to accomplish this can you point me in the direction of another forum for this question?

[djr33]

What you need to do isn't particularly mysterious: you need to use a serverside language to manipulate a database. That's one of the primary functions of a serverside language like PHP (often using a MySQL database).

I'm not sure what a better answer would look like on this one--

You can choose to learn how to do this yourself, or your can hire someone to do it for you.

It's possible that some service could provide this, but I don't see how we could really help with that either.

There are plenty of tutorials out there if you'd like to try one.

[traq]

If you want something similar in functionality to ConstantContact, I can tell you coding it yourself is not a quick solution (especially if you're not sure where to start). Does Constant Contact not do what you need? I've never used them, but they seemed to be a fairly full-featured service.

[djr33]

Right-- it entirely depends on how many features you need and how much time you have.

But of course you probably don't need all of the features in any particular third-party solution-- you just need the subset of features you'd actually use. So making it yourself would be easier than remaking Constant Contact (or whatever) in its entirety.

[djr33]

mlegg, this thread is (for some unknown reason) attracting a huge amount of spam. I'm closing it for that reason. If you want it re-opened, just send me (or another mod) a PM.