ARP Plugin

Alex,

I have 2 questions relating to the ARP plugin for aMember Pro.

First -- I can't find any information page on what it allows. Could you give a brief explanation here on what is sent from aMember to ARP during the sign up process?

And... secondly.

Since I already have members in the aMember system -- what happens after I install the ARP plugin? Will the existing members have to be added manually?

Thanks in advance for your superb help.

Kind Regards,
Rozey Gean

I have the ARP plugin but I have not gotten around to fully configuring ARP itself. So take my answers with a grain of salt.

Regarding your Question #1:
I believe the plugin accesses ARP by sending a "remote control" command. It took me a while to find documentation on this, but it is located in the .pdf documentation for ARP - which needs to be obtained from their website.

In this .pdf file they explain the various ways to submit info to ARP, and included is a (very brief) section on what they call remote control. This is essentially a specific email address that you are supposed to send commands to. I don't remember to syntax of the top of my head, but basically it includes a few mandatory fields and allows for more optional ones.

When someone signs up with amember, it places their info in the db via this remote control command. Although ARP allows for quite a bit of info, I believe amember only sends fname, lname, email, and listname - where listname is the name of the autoresponder series you have associated with a particular amember product.

For Question #2:
I'm almost certain you will need to import yourself. In fact, I believe this is true of all plugins. Amember doesn't do anything about the past, it only adds info going forward.

Will this plugin be enhanced

Alex,

We've just bought and looked at this plug-in.

It seems a bit basic at this stage. I was hoping it would funtion in this manner..... when a member updates his/her email address in aMember, the email address is modified in the arp database.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is not possible with your plug-in at this time?

If not, please consider implementing this feature. It would be extremely useful to us, and I suspect many other aMember customers.

Cheers,

Herby

Alex,

I wonder if it's possible to use the remote control in this way ... to work around that integration limitation in ARPlus - for not being able to update email address from amember.

If member email changes in amember send two remote control message to ARPlus: one to unsubscribe old address (or drop it) and then send a new one to ARPlus with new email address to resubscribe to same autoresponder.

Then when you go to mail in ARPlus ... changed/unsubscribed address won't go out, but newly subscribed address will.

You could perhaps even make this more smooth by adding a tracking tag when sending to unsubscribe old address, so it shows up in ARPlus as "changedaddress" or something to that effect. Then the owner could periodically go into ARPlus and delete all emails with that tracking tag - kind of a routine clean up.

Even without doing that clean up routine ... it should not affect broadcast mailings. One thing I just thought of though ... if someone is on a series of messages ... it wouldn't be able to remember the one they are on ... and basically have to start over, which would look unprofessional.

So it probably could work ... but only for newsletter type lists, not autoresponder messages.

Another option, yet less automated, but more thorough for both uses (ARPlus autoresponder messages and mailings). ... if amember could send out an email to admin when a member's email address changes ... then we could update it in Arplus manually ...?

Any thoughts or ideas on ARPlus integration from other members welcomed as well.

Jeff

ARP plug-in needs to be enhanced

I must agree with Jeff. We've purchased the ARP/aMember plug-in and the integration is too basic.

While I can appreciate that ARP does not follow a "membership" model, but merely the submission of an email address, there is a bit more that can be done at the aMember end.

What we'd like to see is this....

When a member signs up in aMember, there should be an admin function that allows to stipulate which autoresponders should be triggered to that member. Yes, there is already an autoresponder feature in aMember, but ARP is a different beast and the plug-in should allow a better interaction with it.

At the very least, the plug-in should automatically update the email address in ARP when changed in the aMember profile. Ideally there should be a drop-down menu to define a global update in the ARP database, or just in certain autorepsonders.

Hopefully the guys at CGI-Central can make the ARP plug-in more functional.

Cheers,

Herby