Mass Mailer

After consulting with the ARROW staff and obtaining feedback about the objectives they envision for their website, I wrote another Activity Workplan (2) that should give idea of what work I will be doing in the following months.

I have been researching several different methods for creating a mass mailer for the ARROW website. By extending the com_letterman component that already exists as a joomla! component I will save time by not having to create a mass mailer from scratch and I will take advantage of the work that has been done to integrate this component within the Joomla! framework. The following modifications will be made :

Alter the send now option to include choice by country, interests, experience
-> should be able to send to multiple countries, interests, experience

Alter the mail sender to filter out specified users.

Add choice by country, interests, experience into table.
-> change data abstraction layer
-> change create table

Use a scheduled task to send mass email on particular date. (cron jobs??)

Use calendar to submit scheduled task.

Import information into database.

Another option I am looking at is integrating the mass mailer queue class from PEAR
into the Joomla! framework. PEAR does an excellent job of managing newsletters that must be sent by CRON jobs.

I am currently still learning more about the Joomla! framework.
I have to find out how to create new tables when installing a component/module into Joomla!
I still need to learn more about the data abstraction layer that Joomla! and use this intead of the data abstraction layer PEAR uses. (get DB or something like that) I might be easier to reverse engineer and rewrite the mailqueue class in Joomla!

I also need to learn more about the patTemplate system. Where should patTemplate be implemented under the model view control system.

I also need to learn how the mass mailer's use the MIME object and other functionality that I would need to build my mass mailer. I also need to decide whether it would be best to build this component from scratch, or just exctend the letterman or massmailer component.