Our organization has needed a more user-accessible mass email solution for some time, so when we saw Sendy it was a no-brainer to pick up the dead cheap $59 license and spin up an instance. The whole thing has a minimal, functional, easy-to-explain feel to it and allows the creation of as many “Brands” as needed, each with their own logins, custom templates, custom lists, etc. The sole hangup was that it only supported billing for campaigns through PayPal, and we simply aren’t allowed to accept payment that way.
Internal payments here work through an in-house system and are issued with invoices, which I’ve heard are pieces of paper that people hand to each other and put in things called “filing cabinets.” I needed to figure out a way to do invoicing with Sendy, and I’m happy to say it wasn’t all that difficult.
The resulting Sendy Invoicing add-on, available on GitHub, allows an admin to check a new box labeled “Charge via invoice” under a brand’s payment settings. Users are then shown a customizable, printable invoice when they’d normally be sent to Paypal. Upon accepting an invoice, a copy is emailed to the payee for record-keeping.
The whole project plugs right into the Sendy server, and after running an install script that uses a few broad regular expressions to insert two small blocks of code into Sendy’s files, it’s ready to run. Admittedly, it’s not an ideal integration. There isn’t really any plugin architecture or hooks that I could find, so it relies on modifying a couple of the core files, but I tried to make it as minimally invasive, straightforward, and well-documented as possible so that version updates don’t necessarily put it out of commission.
View the project on GitHub and transport your own Sendy server back to the 80s!
