simplenews

Dankzij uitstel van de telecomwet hebben eigenaren van mailinglijsten nu nog tot 1 oktober 2009 om hun mailinglijst te valideren. De nieuwe wet bepaalt dat per 1 oktober iedereen vooraf toestemming moet geven voor opname in een e-mailbestand. Dit geld niet alleen voor nieuwe toevoegingen maar ook voor bestaande lijsten. De nieuwe wet zou oorspronkelijk op 1 juli actief worden.

It took a while, but finally today I released the first simplenews release candidate! And I'm proud of it. It was on February 3rd 2008 that I committed the first Drupal 6 port of Simplenews module. I was surprised how quickly the conversion from Drupal 5 went. Only 40 hours for a basic conversion ;) But basic was not enough and I got my hands dirty, very dirty. The mailing back-end is now fully rewritten to make it even more reliable and scalable than simplenews ever was. As non English site builder I also wanted Simplenews to be fully i18n compatible, and now it is. Also usability was on my list: I simplified forms, added permissions and even removed some rarely used features. Last but not least I wanted simplenews to work well with other modules: CCK, Views, Actions and Triggers. Now, approx 180 hours and 140 commits later the module is good enough to be released.

In august and september 2008 I held a questionnaire amongst simplenews users to get a better picture of the use of the module and the wishes of the current users. No less than 60 people participated and as expected the questionnaire gave better insights and helped me to make plans for future development of simplenews.

These are the results of the questionnaire and my outline of future development.