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Best plug-in to create and manage e-cards
There was a previous post on this subject, but there seems to several versions of it and not much feedback so I’m creating a fresh one.
I need to add e-cards to a site I’m working on, but was unsure what plug-in (if I need one at all) would work best.
The type of card I was looking at would feature on a promotional page, the visitor would fill out a TO, FROM and MESSAGE field. The card would include a link back to the page as a way of increasing traffic/interest. An enhanced version could have additional fields which allow the card to be customised, but this may be getting a little complicated!
My initial thoughts are that zem_contact_reborn might work.
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Re: Best plug-in to create and manage e-cards
It seems that zem_contact_reborn with the send article feature would definitely be a good place to start.
Would you need to store the cards on your site for retrieval by the recipient or do they just get sent and forgotten?
Shoving is the answer – pusher robot
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Re: Best plug-in to create and manage e-cards
I can see “send_article” feature of ZCR being used for this purpose. At one point I hacked this feature to allow sending “html” So thoeretically, you could set up
- an article form/section for for e-cards
- use an article for each e-card, with a “send-article” button at the bottom
- when the user clicks that it get’s handled by ZCR and you can have whatever fields you want in the form
This doesn’t handle multi part mime. Perhaps postmaster could be bent toward this purpose. You should float the idea.
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Re: Best plug-in to create and manage e-cards
Thanks for your feedback, it looks like zem_contact_reborn could be my quickest route, but I’ll post Dale’s suggestion on the Postmaster page and see what everyone thinks.
Patrick, good question regards storing the cards. Ideally I’d like the card to be send as a html email which appears in their mail application, but not everyone will be able to receive this way due to spam protection, etc, so I should really have a text only option which links to the card in a web browser.
Last edited by decoderltd (2007-03-02 17:19:52)
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Re: Best plug-in to create and manage e-cards
decoderltd wrote:
Patrick, good question regards storing the cards.
That’s how we did it at my last job which is why I asked :)
Ideally I’d like the card to be send as a html email which appears in their mail application, but not everyone will be able to receive this way due to spam protection, etc, so I should really have a text only option which links to the card in a web browser.
This is the part that could get complicated because you will need to in effect store an instance of the article with the message they fill out in ZCR. Maybe store it as a comment and come up with something to retrieve that comment as the page content. In effect it’s a really a public article submission. I can’t think of anything in the wild right now that could handle this.
I can’t remember if ZCR still has an API (haven’t been keeping up with it) but if it does you could store each message as a comment in the master article, send the comment ID with the message and pass it back in the URL linking back to the e-card.
It shouldn’t be too hard to write a plugin that would then allow you to fetch the comment ID from the URL, pull the appropriate comment from the DB and display it as the page.
Shoving is the answer – pusher robot
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Re: Best plug-in to create and manage e-cards
Part of the plugin for TXPhorum is a public-side submission form. Currently you can only specify the section you want the article posted to; and it would require some tweaking on your part to make it do exactly what you want it to do, I think. But it’s there.
- Ben
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Re: Best plug-in to create and manage e-cards
Thanks for your help Patrick and Ben, I’ll look into your suggestions and see if I can get something up and running. Will report back if sucessful!
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