Mass Contact

• When I asked you to come on the show, you replied by saying that Mass Contact was never meant to be a newsletter module. So, can you explain exactly what Mass Contact is, how does it works, and how it should be used?
• What are some of the features?
  • You can send a message to one or more categories of users, which are specified by role.
  • Large recipient lists may be broken up into smaller chunks.
  • The site administrator can control how many messages are allowed to be sent by a single person in an hour.
  • The message may be sent such that the recipients' e-mail addresses are hidden from each other.
  • The message may be sent as plain text or HTML, even specifying the input format filter to use. (The Drupal 7 version requires the Mime Mail module.)
  • The message may include one or more binary file attachments. (The Drupal 7 version requires the Mime Mail module.)
  • The site administrator may specify different texts to be placed at the beginning and/or the end of every message that is sent out.
  • A copy of the message may be saved as a node.
  • Users may opt-out, by category, of receiving mass mailings on their account settings page.
• Can users subscribe/unsubscribe?
• What is the documentation like? Are there screencasts?

Use Cases

• What is an appropriate use for this module?

Last week brought two episodes with Mike Carper talking about Drupal Performance. This week brings one more performance episode, this time with Khalid, then another special Wednesday episode to talk about the User Points module. (Don't get used to two episodes a week... It's just a fluke that it happened twice in a row! ;-p)

Khalid works for 2bits consulting on Drupal performance.
Some things he talks about include:

• Who needs these services
• Diagnosis before Treatment, no guess work
• The Contributed Module Open Buffet Binge syndrome
• Cloud, Amazon AWS and cost vs. performance
• Complexity is a disease
• Performance Assessment service (full and targeted)
• Install/Configure/Tune your server
• Hosting for performance
• 3.4 million page views per day on a single server

This is part two of my talk with Mike Carper about his Drupal performance modules. If speed and performance are essential to your work, listen to these episodes!

Modules discussed in this episode:

• Boost
• DB Tuner
• Cache Expiration
• HTTP Parallel Request Library
• Files Proxy
• ImageField Zip/HTML5 Bulk Upload

Have you ever wanted to run 1300+ domains off of one Drupal install? Listen in while I talk to Mike Carper of Data Sphere about the Drupal performance modules he's contributed that make it possible for them to do just that.

This first episode will cover his front-end performance modules, and on Wednesday, there will be a special part 2 episode where we talk about his back-end performance modules.

The modules covered in this episode include:

• Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation
• Edge Side Includes integration
• Image Info Cache
• Fork of CSS Embedded Images
• CDN