[FX.php List] Mail List Upload & Management

[Dale Bengston]

Hi All,

I have this small empire of web-to-print publishing sites, all driven  
by FileMaker. One is a system that allows dealers to customize a  
trade publication. The user population of dealers (about 50 in all)  
uses my site to customize eight pages of a 28-page magazine. The  
content for the other twenty pages is provided by the parent company.

The parent company has now asked me to look into allowing the dealers  
to upload and manage their mailing lists for the magazine through my  
site. Apparently, they are supplying the same poorly-groomed lists on  
a quarterly basis, over and over, causing a lot of cleanup and  
avoidable busy-work. My mission is to provide a web-based tool for  
the dealers to upload their sloppy mail lists and clean them up. Then  
it will be in better shape to mail the magazine every quarter.

We're only talking about some basic validation: address, city, state,  
zip are not empty. Nothing beyond that. No matching to the USPS  
database or anything.

The part I want to think out well ahead of time is initial uploading.  
I will have some control over file formats (probably Excel, CSV and  
delimited text), but I have to tap into the FMP import capability,  
probably via script. This is an FMU v6 installation, although I may  
be able to put up v8 for just the mail list module if it helps. (I  
don't think it will, because there's no client on the web server to  
do the import with.)

So, any thoughts on how to approach this? Am I on the right track to  
use PHP to upload the file, and then script an import?

Thanks for your help,
Dale