Magento newsletter_subscriber change_status_at - magento

Question

I've been looking for a while at other threads, several have been close to what I need but not quite.
When a guest or customer sign up for our newsletter the field change_status_at populates with a timestamp.
However, if the guest or customer unsubscribe, we would like the the change_status_at field to pickup the current timestamp.
This is important to use because we do not use the newsletter "feature" of Magento 1.7.0.2 CE. Rather we export the newletter_subscriber list to a company to send an email.
Thank you,
Dan

Answer 1

I just ran into this too. A customer wanted to know the date when a subscribe/unsubscribe action occurred. Looking around the internets I've found a few others who have run into this and some claim that it used to work in very old version of Magento.
I think what happened is that the field definition for change_status_at used to be setup to auto update as a default timestamp (i.e. ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP), but that was lost in some update. So there's no Magento code that writes to the field, because MySql is supposed to magically maintain it.
You could try updating the table definition to add the ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP back in (but I'm not in favor changing default model tables) or adding another field to be the default timestamp field.
Or a better solution would be to create a module with an observer to just add the date in when the subscription changes. Here's that might look like (warning - this code is just an example, there may be some syntax errors due to expunging my module's info) -
app/code/local/Myco/MyMod/etc/config.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
<modules>
<Myco_MyMod>
<version>1.0.0</version>
</Myco_MyMod>>
</modules>
<global>
<models>
<myco>
<class>Myco_MyMod_Model</class>
</myco>
</models>
<events>
<newsletter_subscriber_save_before>
<observers>
<mycomymod_observer_subscriber>
<type>singleton</type>
<class>Myco_MyMod_Model_Observer</class>
<method>setUpdateDate</method>
</mycomymod_observer_subscriber>
</observers>
</newsletter_subscriber_save_before>
</events>
</global>
</config>
===========
in app/code/local/Myco/MyMod/Modules/Observer.php
<?php
class Myco_MyMod_Model_Observer
{
public function setUpdateDate(Varien_Event_Observer $observer) {
$subscriber = $observer->getSubscriber();
$subscriber['change_status_at'] = (date("Y-m-d H:i:s", time()));
}
}