EE2 reprieve, EE3 third-party plugin support
News and General
Definitely understand the bind you’re in Steve. You’ll find this is not unique to ExpressionEngine. Any extensible platform that gains popularity with developers ends up with a third-party market, and these are human not technical issues, so no product is immune. Thankfully most ExpressionEngine developers are responsive, run active businesses, and provide solid support for their software.
And we heard v2 customers loud and clear, and v3 has far more capabilities out of the box, with a lot less reliance on add-ons. For functionality that is in high demand, we’ve been going native, and for the other 20%, the market typically takes care of the need. I don’t think you’ve had a chance to build many sites on v3 yet, but I think you’ll be happy when you do.
While it certainly doesn’t help you with this particular site, the low demand for this functionality is probably why no other developer has shipped a replacement for Postmaster. If I may ask, which particular features from Postmaster are essential for this site?
Thanks for the responses. I’ve tried to contact them through Twitter, hopefully they’ll respond.
Regarding one of my client projects, we created a web app that solicits and tracks sponsors and donations for a fundraising campaign each year for a private school. Postmaster is used throughout the process from the initial contact all the way through a successful donation (a receipt). It’s also used in various cron jobs for regular reminders pulling data from the db to construct the unique urls for donations to specific students and staff. It also integrates with Mandrill for the distribution. I’ve created close to 20 custom hooks and notifications for this specific fundraiser and several other one-off fundraising events. (registrations, event ticketing, etc)
True, I have not yet made the move for any of my clients to EE3 as there are costs involved (EE3 upgrade license, verifying available plugins, time) which a majority of my clients are happy as long as their site works. I can’t and won’t force paying for an upgrade if it’s not necessary. If it ain’t broke….
Postmaster is a different story as it is broken which is why I’m searching for solutions. If EE has the abilities of Postmaster built in, then I’ll be researching it further. I am planning to make the app mobile-friendly over the summer which means I’ll be getting my hands dirty updating the 50+ templates and it would be the right time to make any major transitions.
Ok thanks for the extra details, Steve. So in broad strokes, you need to be able to add a notification email to any potential action that a visitor takes or that you setup a cron for. Have you looked into services for drip campaigns or similar that would handle that side of things for you, rather than having the CMS manage it? Not sure to what degree those services have matured to have complex decision trees, just trying to think of options for you to move away from Postmaster rather than spend further resources on software that isn’t being maintained.