Writer's block, an owner's guide: Off topic: how to install a mailing list

I recently installed phplist. At least I think I did. It’s kinda hard to be sure what happened.

I’d wanted to install a mailing list and I decided against Mailman (I wasn’t in the mood to experiment with a GNU project; time was short).

My goal was to set up something that would work predictably.

From that point of view phplist was an “interesting” choice.

phplist 2.9.4, although marketed as mailing list software, seems to be some sort of game. At every turn there is a new challenge to solve. For players whose time is as short as mine was, here are some cheats.

1) Using your web host’s Fantastico facility, which is specially provided to install software easily, install phplist.

2) Fantastico and phplist do not play well together, and the software that gets installed will not run at all. Uninstall it and return to go.

3) Go to the official phplist site and download the zip file. The installation directions on the site are admirably simple.

4) Deceptively simple, in fact. Nothing will happen. When you try to open the admin page in a browser, as instructed, you’ll get nothing but a 500 error.

5) The problem is in links/.htaccess. You can fix that by deleting the final line of that file (a line about “php_value”).

6) Now the admin page will open, and will tell you that you have another error. This is quite a good trick on the part of the writers: the config file that you downloaded contains wrong values for three constants. You have to edit config.php. In the three constants called pageroot, adminpages and attachment_repository, the folder name “phplist” should be changed to “lists” which is the standard, default, name.

7) Now you’ll get an error about something called an attachment repository. Turns out you have to create a folder called lists/attachments and make it writable. Nobody told you that.
Finally the system will stop complaining and there is nothing in your error log. But don’t worry! The fun is just beginning. The “initialize database” button doesn’t initialize the database.

9) The cheat now is to initialize it yourself. Open phpMyAdmin (on site5, this is in NetAdmin under MySQL), click the SQL tab, click Browse, find the file phplist.sql in the distribution (finding it on your local machine is fine) and click Go. This initializes the database.

10) Back to the admin page, and now it will ask for a username and a password. Of course you have no idea what these might be. You can’t even use the “Forgot Password” option unless you know what email address it thinks you used previously. No matter what you try, the system makes no comment. Are the addresses right? wrong? all I can tell you is none of them will ever receive a password reminder. The cheat is to enter username “admin” and password “phplist”.

11) Now go back to the main admin page. Refresh it and the page comes up perfectly. The obvious move now is to add yourself as an admin and delete the default admins.

12) But it’s the wrong move. Whenever you confirm a change, instead of returning to your own site afterwards you’ll be bounced off to phplist.com. There is no place in the config file to correct this. This is a serious challenge and, in fact, marks the completion of your struggle with 2.9.4.

13) The wjole thing was a dream. It turns out that, directly contrary to the directions on tincan’s website, the current version of phplist is a development version which DOES NOT WORK. To play Level Two you need to download version 2.9.3.

14) Repeating some of the above steps, you can get 2.9.3 to start. But don’t worry; it’s a joke, and this level is even harder than the last. phplist will complain that your database is in an out of date format. So you delete the entire database and create a new, empty, database with the same name (your same database user name will still have permissions to access the new database, which is genuinely useful and saves you about one minute in getting to the next challenge). phplist will now fail miserably with a MySQL syntax error.

15) Go further back and download version 2.8.12. This actually runs, sort of.

16) The fun is still just beginning! On the config page you can edit various standard system messages and pages. This is a great laugh because your edits make no difference at all to the messages and pages that your users will see. Later you will find an utterly different page where you can edit the very same messages again, and this is the right place to do it.

17) But your test emails to your mailing list never get sent. Without anyone telling you, the config file contains a variable “test” which inhibits outgoing messages (no, this is not the same as setting the “test mailing list” as active).

18) By this point you are ready to pay money for something that actually works.

19) But not from the same people.

After that adventure, I am trying Dada Mail. If nothing else, the web site is cute.

If I like Dada Mail and if it works smoothly and quietly, then the game is over and you will probably not hear another word about it. If it sucks, however…

Published on May 2, 2005 at 9:27 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/off-topic-how-to-install-a-mailing-list.html

4 Comments

Mailman is solid software. Easy to install and maintain. I’m sorry to hear that you think that GNU software is ‘experimental’. A lot of it is, but mailman certainly isn’t one of those packages.

I’m quite puzzled why your hosting provider doesn’t include mailing lists.

Comment by Evelyn Mitchell — May 2, 2005 @ 11:26 pm
It does; it provides Mailman and attempts to provide phplist.

As for Mailman, I don’t regard it as an experimental product, I regarded it as something I would have to put some effort and thought into, and I made a terrible mistake when I looked for an alternative. I’m sure your description is right, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself back at GNU before the end of the week (Dada Mail is still impressive at this time, though: installs easily, appears solid and offers a reasonable range of features).

Comment by McJung — May 3, 2005 @ 8:20 am
If you give Dada Mail a go, try out the next version’s Release Candidate:

http://mojo.skazat.com/download/testing_2_9_0_rc1.html

It’s rock solid and makes anything in the 2.8.x series look miserable in comparison.

Comment by Justin — May 7, 2005 @ 10:06 pm
I’m using Dada Mail on this site now, I got it installed and configured quickly and I’m happy with the initial setup. Justin, I’ll upgrade shortly.

Comment by McJung — May 7, 2005 @ 11:12 pm