Hi,
In order to prepare my Joomla!3 Site for Joomla!4 I am currently migrating from AMS 5.10.23 to AMS 7.7.5.
I have installed AMS 7.7.5 in parallel to AMS 5.10.23 and successfully imported my configuration, lists, newsletters, templates and subscribers. - Nice 👍
On my website I use AMS primarily to let visitors subscribe or unsubscribe to different news services. For some services visitors can also request an email with a download link while they fill in the subscription form. In order to support this special functionality, I do not use the modules or plugins of AMS but php programmed forms following the acymailing developer documentation.
I have started with the API code examples and could sucessfully access my mailing lists, insert a user and subscribe to a mailing list. After subscribing to a mailing list, I got a confirmation email and after confirmation the user was added to the subscriber list. - Nice as well 👍
Unfortunately, unsubscribing per API did not work at all. Instead, I had to use the unsubscribe link in the subscription confirmation email. However, in this way a user can only unsubscribe but his account in the subscriber list is not removed, even if the user has no subscriptions anymore. This is a disadvantage compared to AMS 5.10.23, where a user could easily manage his subscriptions and his account. in AMS 7.7.5 the Joomla! admin has to clean up unsubscribed user accounts on a regular basis in order to meet the GDPR. 🙁
Furthermore, I noticed that once a user has unsubscribed from a list, it is not possible for the same user to subscribe per API again to the same list. The API code that had successfully created a new user account and subscribed the user to a mailing list does not seem to work anymore, when the given user account (without any subscription) already exists. 🙁
This is the reason, why I dropped the idea to use the API and fell back to subscription via URL. This method does allow a user with an existing AMS account to re-subscribe to a previously unsubscribed mailing list.
So with a couple of compromises, I think I can run AMS 7.7.5 on my website. I appreciate the work of the AMS team, but compared to AMS 5.10.23 the current state feels a bit like a regression. I miss in particular the possibility to let subscribers manage their account.
Maybe I have missed some details in the documentation or configuration. After all AMS is a pretty complex extension. So, if there is a solution that I have missed, I would appreciate to get some feedback.
Merci
Hans
