Although I thought I really had researched everything thoroughly before purchasing the commercial license, Caveat Emptor applies regardless…

I would strongly recommend that EE specify clearly in the ‘members & groups’ documentation that group membership is exclusive, i.e. it is not possible to belong to more than one group.

In the same vein, it is also not possible to directly ‘join’ the mailing-lists and the user, i.e. the userid in the mailing list tables is not relationally linked to the userid in the user tables. Unfortunately, this then means there is a disconnect between the email address in the user profile, and the email address in the mailing list.

This, to me is an extremely weak point of EE, and would have been a dealbreaker had we caught on to that earlier. Now we are fudging around with cron scripts to get data back and forth to the mailing lists for messages that rightly should have been based on permissions (groups).

Having said that, EE is a nice framework otherwise. Please read the above to be another vote (of which I have found many in the forums) for more granular multi-group membership permissions.

/Ulf

Ulf, can you clarify a bit? When I go to the communicate tab I see “send to member group” which lets you send an email to, well, a member group - exactly the kind of relation you seem to be asking for.  You can also send to the mailing list *and* whichever groups you wish to send to.

If you can clarify on how this differs from what you need then that would help.

Hi Lisa

Sure: What we have is an intranet based setup, where I would belong in different functions, and receive notifications based on what has been posted in different areas.

Ideally I would be able to be in the ‘Management’, ‘Sales’, and ‘R&D’ groups, and receive mailings sent to them. However, since group membership is exclusive, this is not possible.

Alternatively I could then be subscribed to several mailing-lists. This is OK, but now there is a disconnect between the email I have in my membership profile, and the one that is stored in the mailing list. If my profile email address is changed, the one in the mailing list isn’t automatically.

In other words the email addresses are redundant in the the EE database between the member and mailing-list tables, and I then have to run some kind of sync script externally to continually ensure that the mailing list is ‘fed’ from the user profile data. We’re working on putting a hook whenever a user’s informationn is updated, but given the time constraints on this, it’ll probably break some core stuff which we’ll have to come back and fix later prior to making an update.

I hope this clears it up a bit.

Rgds…

/Ulf

Ulf Preisler - 29 April 2007 02:09 PM

In the same vein, it is also not possible to directly ‘join’ the mailing-lists and the user, i.e. the userid in the mailing list tables is not relationally linked to the userid in the user tables. Unfortunately, this then means there is a disconnect between the email address in the user profile, and the email address in the mailing list.

Uh, what? The mailinglist is mainly for non-members, you can send mail to a specified member groups anyway.

EDIT: I see what you mean. Well, for an Intranet solution you really shouldn’t be dependent on email anyway. Just my €0.02.

Be that as it may, in this case that is what the client wants, so that is the brief we have   Personally I would have preferred RSS feeds or similar, but outside the tech arena, many corporations still prefer email, so…

/Ulf

Ingmar - 30 April 2007 10:26 AM

Ulf Preisler - 29 April 2007 02:09 PM

In the same vein, it is also not possible to directly ‘join’ the mailing-lists and the user, i.e. the userid in the mailing list tables is not relationally linked to the userid in the user tables. Unfortunately, this then means there is a disconnect between the email address in the user profile, and the email address in the mailing list.

Uh, what? The mailinglist is mainly for non-members, you can send mail to a specified member groups anyway.

EDIT: I see what you mean. Well, for an Intranet solution you really shouldn’t be dependent on email anyway. Just my €0.02.

I am having the same problems with the mailing list feature and it is not intranet. We have 3000 or so association members (in 4 different classes) who have the option of registering for the member’s only website. Because we are a labor union, we have several opt-in mailing lists (Political, Events, Negotiations, etc…) that are available for members to join if they wish.

There is no way for the member to choose which lists they want to be on (without manually subscribing to several lists one at a time), and since the mailing lists are totally unconnected from the member information, they update their main profile, but cannot update the mailing list.

As an non-profit association, we must conform to opt-in standards for mailing lists and cannot just blast every type of email to every person in a member group. There is also plenty of overlap.

Ideally EE should offer
A)
a built-in, compatible mailing list function that lets members subscribe and unsubscribe to mailing lists in their profile area.

b) A form that can be used to subscribe to multiple lists at one time (lists of the users choice, not a batch of lists they can’t control)

Pulling this thread back from a year ago. I do hope that there is some improvement in this area slotted in for 2.0