CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm posting to this topic because I'm interested in it.

I've not figured out how to do this yet, but I'm planning on a link from the email to an unsubscribe form.  Perhaps the link could pass a token used to determine the member info.

Similar for updates but using the token know what member information to present and allow updates.  If no token, ask for email and generate confirmation email.   Will be looking at CiviMember to see if it can handle this.  In my mind every contact in the database is a member, some give us money and some don't.

Hi geilhufe

If we can determine the contact record enough to unsubscribe, is something else stopping us from allowing updates to contact information.

Thinking of a situation where we have thousands of contact records, none (or few) are users.  The information will continually be going out of date.  We could periodically notify the user of their information and ask them to update.  Otherwise a huge manual process. 

Don't mean to nit pick - I know CiviCRM has much more contact management functionality than phplist, but somehow phplist allows contact info to me updated  by contacts by clicking a profile link in the email the the contact received (I've wondered if a forwarded email might allow someone else to update - not sure).  I think there is a token passed back, but I'm not sure - somehow the input form knows who is trying to update their contact info and displays their existing info.  Are other's using a separate custom process that they've developed?  Seems unlikely that large installations are doing the updates all manually.

You mentioned a separate drupal site - what would be in that site that we don't have in our civicrm site?

Thanks and have a good turkey day.

This all sounds very interesting and has given me enough ammunition to go away and figure out this stuff in my own time.

Geilhufe: The unsubscribe from emails takes me to a confirmation screen in CiviCRM - the backend. So the 'unsubscribe from' email brings you back into CiviCRM rather than some place on the company website.

As far as I can figure out, the standalone profiles are the closest I can get to this functionality. Although as I understand it, I need some kind of authentication mechanism for the user to login to this area. I think the authentication in phplist is done in the URL - the system assumes that the unique URL is enough to identify the user.

Dave: as for the situation where you have thousands of users/contacts, and have to manually update them every time someone changes their details. Welcome to my world. Add to that separate contact systems for education courses, magazine subscription, clinic and enquiries and you'll get a slightly better picture.

For the moment I think I'll get to work on brushing up my Drupal theming skills.

Thanks for all the help guys.

James.

Cheers Lobo, will look into that. In the meantime, I've been polishing up my knowledge of CSS and migrating the current Drupal theme to something approximating our other website. Actually it looks pretty damn good for a beginner like me.
Highly recommend Firebug for dissecting the ins and outs of the CSS in Drupal.
Cheers all. J