Message stack and email lists (no user accounts required)

[vever001]

Hello,

We are currently using a combination of Simplenews and Subscriptions on a D7 website.
I'm currently investigating the possibility to change to a better, future-proof, approach and I thought about the Message stack.

However Simplenews provides a really convenient feature: lists of emails (no account required and also matches with existing accounts as well) and we don't want to loose this nor create "fake" users.
I had a look at the session_api but it doesn't seem to be of any help in my case.

I've been reading most of the code from the message stack modules including flags.
I'm thinking about creating a module on top of message and message_notify and not to rely on message_subscribe.
Flag which is used to get the recipients would then be replaced by mailing lists

I would create 2 custom entities to achieve this:

• a subscriber entity containing a mail property
• and a subscriber_list entity to... create mailing lists
  Then link subscriber lists to message entities.

Anyone had similar requirements or could give some suggestions/help?

Thank you very much,
Hervé

[jhedstrom]

I'm thinking about creating a module on top of message and message_notify and not to rely on message_subscribe.

I think that's probably the best approach here. There's too much logic in message_subscribe that relies on Drupal user entities I think to try and alter the functionality at that level.

[vever001]

Thanks for your input.

In my view mostly Flag limits the Message stack (or at least message_subscribe) to be usable with users only. With Flag we can specify any target entity type but not a source entity type (which is always user).
What would be truly amazing is to expand the Message Stack to allow any entity to be subscribed.

That would really be an interesting module to work on :)
For now I might stay with Simplenews and customize it because of time constraints :/

[manuee]

@vever001 I find myself with the same need for allowing users to subscribe without a user account, did you ever get started on that module?

[vever001]

@manuee Sadly no (time constraints).
That was a D7 question initially but I suppose it also applies to D8?
Anyway I ended up extending Simplenews and created https://www.drupal.org/project/simplenews_og

[manuee]

thanks @vever001 - yeah applies to d8... and in the end we're going to be using simplenews as well.