[BlueOnyx:09612] Re: Use different PHP version

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Michael,

FWIW: The Solarspeed PHP-5.3.9 comes with the Zend Guard Loader. I think I 
added it back during building PHP-5.3.8 or thereabouts. If the product page 
still mentions the absence of Zend, then I must have forgotten to remove that 
text again.

But as Greg said: Zend is nuts. Not only were they horribly late with getting 
their act together, pages encoded with the old encoder don't work out of the 
box under Zend Guard. IonCube beat them by miles both in speed of release and 
terms of compatability.

What's worse: I've seen Apache die horribly when you try to use Zend Guard 
encoded pages. Instead of showing an error page that says "This page cannot be 
displayed because something is wrong with your encoded file" it blows up 
Apache. Just great!

> The app is an older version of 1-2-all email list software from
> activecampaign.com. I paid $295 for the app and a few years ago I bought a
> support contract to update it for $65.
> 
> Now it seems they have had corporate success and totally changed their
> pricing and they want $766 to let me download a compatible version. I will
> NOT pay that. I only have a few users sending a few thousand emails total a
> month. Totally low volume.
> 
> I guess I can move them to PHPlist or something. Any suggestions? :-)

What kind of software is it exactly? A mailing list software? Or an email 
ticket system? Or an email marketing system for handling subscriptions to one 
directional emails such as advertisements or marketing emails?

Here are some recommendations:

Mailing List: MailMan. Sorry, but that's just it. Hardly anything better 
around for large lists.

Email Ticket system: OTRS (http://www.otrs.org)

Email Marketing: OpenEMM (http://www.openemm.org)

While OTRS can easily be installed on BlueOnyx, for OpenEMM I'd rather 
recommend a "plain" CentOS, Scientifix Linux or Fedora as host OS. After all, 
it brings it's own mailer and webserver with it (runs on port 8080) and that 
will be a bit intrusive and potentially damaging for a BlueOnyx box.

OpenEMM has all the bells and whistles that you'd expect from a marketing 
tool. Including shiny statistics, very good way to handle subscriptions and 
very neat tracking abilities. It's also easy to import large address lists 
from various sources.

Am still running a four year old OpenEMM VPS based on Fedora, but am looking 
into doing a reinstall soon with the latest version. But as I only use it once 
or twice a year, I haven't gotten around to that yet.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber