PHPMyAdmin Help

PHP
1

Hello,

I am a complete amateur when it comes to phpmyadmin so who ever helps me in this topic will need to explain what I need to do in simple steps.

Basically I have signed up to Mailchimp and want to send newsletters from there, but in order to do this I want to be able to get the email address’s from my forum

I have been told this is possible via phpmyadmin but as I have already explained I dont know how this programme works.

Can anyone help me do this?

2

This question is a little vague, next time you might want to include a little more information but I’ll see what I can do to help out.

From what I see you’re using IP Board for your forums. Your member’s emails are stored somewhere in the database used to store all data for IP Board. If IP Board doesn’t have the functionality to export the forum member’s email addresses then you will need to get the email addresses directly from the database.

PhpMyAdmin is web based software that will allow you to browse, query and alter your database using a graphical user interface.

You can access PhpMyAdmin through your hosing provider’s cPanel interface (near the bottom).

Once you get into PhpMyAdmin you need to look through the database tables (using the ‘Browse’ link) to find the email addresses. I’d start looking in the tables that mention ‘users’ or ‘members’.

Once you find the table that stores the email addresses you can export just the ‘email’ field (or what ever it’s called).

Here’s the general gist of how to do that:

  • Make sure you are currently ‘Browsing’ the proper table (make sure you see the actual table data)
  • Click the ‘SQL’ tab located on the top of the page
  • Now you want to create a query to Select only the email addresses that you want (keep in mind there might be inactive/kicked/banned/unregistered users in this table)
    [LIST]
  • Lets assume all user entries are active users. You might want to do something like “SELECT email_address FROM users”. My version of PhpMyAdmin has a ‘Columns’ box to help build queries.
    [/LIST]
  • After creating the proper query click ‘Go’
  • You will now see the results of your query
  • Check the ‘Check All’ check box (usually at the bottom of the query results) to select every entry in the result set
  • Click the ‘Export’ button that is at the bottom of the query results, usually located to the right of the ‘Check All’ check box
  • Select the ‘Custom’ radio button under the heading ‘Export Method’
  • Here are the changes to the options I’d make, but play around till you get the results you like:
    [LIST]
  • Under ‘Output’, change the ‘Compression’
  • Under ‘Format’, I’d choose a format that’s easy to cut and paste, or maybe Mailchimp asks for a specific format, like csv or xml
  • Under ‘Format-specific options’, You’re going to have to wing this depending on the ‘Format’ option you choose
    [/LIST]
  • Click ‘Go’ and check out the results of the output

I hope this points you in the proper direction.

3

Thanks for your help. Starting to understand a little better.

I have tried to do what you are saying at the ‘SQL’ step but when i select email so it displays like so:

emailSELECT * FROM ibf_members WHERE 1

and then press go i get the following error message:

#1064 - You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘emailSELECT * FROM ibf_members WHERE 1 LIMIT 0, 30’ at line 1

4

This is where you will need some knowledge of SQL syntax.

SELECT * FROM ibf_members means: select every column from the table ibf_members.

So if you only want to select the email column, you will need to use this statement: SELECT email FROM ibf_members

But keep in mind, that table lists every member that has ever created a user account, including banned or inactive accounts. You will need to use a ‘WHERE’ statement so those accounts are not included. What to put in your ‘WHERE’ statement depends on how IB Forums marks accounts as banned/inactive/ect…

You could just grab every email address and manually remove them from the file PhpMySql creates, but that might be time consuming if there are a lot of members.

Look through these docs to become more familiar with MySQL Syntax regarding data retrieval: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/retrieving-data.html