PHPList Setup

Can anyone tell me how to setup my list in PHPlist admin to integrated with amember once the plugin for amember is working.

Do I create a new list in phplist and make it active?

Do I create diff lists for diff membership levels?

Are my emails then sent by logging into phplists admin area?

Any help, step-by-step directions would be useful....
Thanks

I'm looking forward to an answer as well.

I second my desire to have this replied by anyone who has installed and is using this plugin.

Thanks,

Hi dear friends, I am new here, I have so many question about this forum. But first time says hello for all member and moderator who are starting a thread.

I just installed the phpList plug-in and the instructions are not very detailed for people who don't do this for a living. Tech support was great, though, and configured it for me in less than 24 hours. Here's what I learned - maybe it will save someone else a headache.

First, if you don't configure it properly, it will crash the system and you won't be able to get into aMember to fix it. I got the program back up by removing the phpList plugin folder. Then I was getting an error because aMember couldn't find the file. I put a dummy file in place (a file with the same name but no code in it) and that stopped the errors from showing up on my sign-up page until tech support could help. Thank you to previous posters for sharing that information.

Here are the settings tech support used in Setup/Configuration > phpList (fields not listed were left blank):
phpList Other DB: YES
phpList DB & Prefix (user tables): MySQL database_name of phpList database.phplist_user_ (this was autodetected)
phpList DB & Prefix (non-user tables): MySQLdatabase_name of phpList database.phplist_

When that was configured properly, then my lists from phpList showed up in aMember and I was able to choose which lists to exclude from aMember access. Then when I went into aMember > Manage Products, I was able to edit each product type so that members subscribing to that product type will have their e-mail addresses sent to a corresponding list in phpList (I had already set up and activated a different list in phpList for each product type).

I did a rebuild database in aMember, and e-mail addresses for all members for each product type got transferred to the corresponding list I had set up in phpList.

Then I decided to try and get other fields to cross. There is a mapping function in setup/configuration > phpList. It appears that you must set the corresponding attribute in phpList to be type "textline". To get the names to cross I put in
name_f:First Name
name_l:Last Name

To get custom fields to cross is a little trickier. Custom fields are generally stored in a data base all together (common field) so you must prefix them with data. such as
data.newsletter_option:newsletter option

The reasons I decided to continue using phpList for e-mailing members rather than aMember is because for one thing, phpList has a "test e-mail" function. I can edit and re-edit, sending myself a test e-mail each time to see how it looks before sending it out to all our members. I also like being able to compose and test out a different e-mail for html vs. text recipients. I use the throttling capability because there's nothing more aggravating than spending hours composing an e-mail and then having half of them come back from being marked as spam. I'm using phpList and now aMember to keep up with members of our running club.

Hope this helps other newbies out there.