Newsletter Made Simple (NMS) for CMS Made Simple (CMSMS) is an easy to use bulk mailer, which I have been using for a few years now. In this blog post I will explain some of the functionality problems I have come across and the solutions I use to make NMS my bulk mailer of choice.

I have tired other bulk mailing programs, such as the very popular phpList, but it's nice to just have a native bulk mailer inside the content management system (CMS). A big thank you to lemkepf, calguy1000, and nuno for developing the NMS code. It just needed a few tweaks.

I have been asked many times about how to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to upload and download files in Windows. Here are four simple steps that can be used with Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP to transfer files via FTP. These steps use the windows native FTP capabilities, which means you don't have to download or install anything.

I just released a simple PHP script, which is easy to modify and well commented, that sends the results of a MySQL query as a CSV formatted email attachment. The CSV is properly formatted so it can be opened by Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.org Calc. It can be found under the code section: "Email MySQL Query Results as a CSV File Attachment". I have released it under the GNU GPL free software license, giving you room to modify it to meet your needs.

I opened a new Code section on my site today, which will contain free software licensed under the GNU GPL v3.0.

To kick it off I am releasing the CMSMS Shop Skin Helper. This tool will create cached skin files based upon a CMS Made Simple template. The tutorial included in download provides a walk-through for skinning an osCommerce / Zen Cart installation on the same server as CMS Made Simple. This PHP code is not dependent upon CMS Made Simple, so it could be used to skin all kinds of things.

How to integrate the site design and menus from CMS Made Simple with the default template found in Zen Cart. This method is much better than having similarly themed sites as this method of template integration will give the appearance of a seamless site.

Importing (and Linking) MySQL database tables from a website into Microsoft Access on your desktop. Explained in a very simple 9 step process, complete with pictures.