Send Emails by Date according to Database

takka2010

Hi,

I'm very new to PHP and have strictly used HTML in the past.

I'm doing a website for a friend who runs a service company. He wants to be able to automatically send out reminder emails twice a year to his customers (copying himself also).

I figure I would need a database that lists all his customers along with their email address and their signup date so that I can calculate the reminder emails from that date.

He is computer illiterate so I was hoping to have him login to his own website and I would have to create a database user interface for him to add customers or remove customers from the list.

I only have experience with HTML but I have researched some and I am guessing that I will need cronjob with the email scheduling but I'm unsure of what the best method for the database management interface.

If someone could point me in the right direction that would be awesome.

Thanks.

mykg4orce

since this your first stab (i think) at a php application i would suggest you keep it simple. Don't bother with login and what not. Setup one page that reads from a database and sends out the emails. You can configure your cronjob to run every month. Your script will basically have to read the email address form the database and the date the email was added. The date their email was added to the database can be used to determine their signup date.

Then all your cronjob has to determine is whether the signup date is at least 6months old from today's date.

...But you need to tell us specifically what it is you need help with.

takka2010

mykg4orce;10905165 wrote:
since this your first stab (i think) at a php application i would suggest you keep it simple. Don't bother with login and what not. Setup one page that reads from a database and sends out the emails. You can configure your cronjob to run every month. Your script will basically have to read the email address form the database and the date the email was added. The date their email was added to the database can be used to determine their signup date.

Then all your cronjob has to determine is whether the signup date is at least 6months old from today's date.

...But you need to tell us specifically what it is you need help with.

Thanks for the reply. I guess the big thing I was looking for was what I should use to accomplish this. I'm guessing a combination of cronjob and php but I wasn't sure if it could all be done with php or something simpler. I didn't want to take a chance on guessing a method myself only to find towards the end that I could only do 80% of what I wanted to do.

So I'm gathering from your reply that I can use php to do the database, database interface and emailing. Then I would use cronjob to run it, which in my case would be daily since it is possible an email might need to be sent daily once my friend has built a large enough client-base.

If you know of examples out there that might help then that would be awesome, I was planning on diving into the code myself once I had a clear picture of what language I needed.

Thanks for the quick reply.