Send & Post content by email?

Someone has asked me to help them with a website (creating in MODx) and I need a way to post news information via email. That is, I send the article in an email as plain text (or Markdown) to a special address and it is automatically posted to the website as a news article.

Of course I would need to form the email in a certain way so MODx would know how to handle it, including username and email to ensure the sender had permission.

I know this seems like a strange thing to do but I am going to need to post it over a satellite link in remote part of the world and may not have time / bandwith to access the HTML site.

Anyone got ideas?

Well, first you need to have a way to access the email. I don’t believe you can do that from PHP; you’ll need a server script that gets the email from the server’s incoming mailbox, then makes it available to your webspace php script. There are probably Perl script that do this; you would need to work with the database directly, checking the sender’s email and perhaps a password in the subject, with the user tables, then format the email message and load it into the site_content field.

It looks like this might do the job, you could use it to write the mail as an html file to a given folder, then use a snippet to include the file in your document’s content, or use a module for a manager user to load the file into the site_content table.

http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/mhonarc.html#whatis

This is not so unreasonnable, I know some blogging tools allow this kind of thing, we had request @Textpattern about this, but I don’t remember which... I’ll try to find it back and post here.

Coincidentally, a class called "PHP Email To DB" was just included in today’s phpclasses.org digest. Uses the PHP IMAP extension. I haven’t looked at it, but maybe it’s what you need.

http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/3324.html

Quote from: jlarson at Aug 29, 2006, 10:22 AM

Coincidentally, a class called "PHP Email To DB" was just included in today’s phpclasses.org digest. Uses the PHP IMAP extension. I haven’t looked at it, but maybe it’s what you need.

http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/3324.html

I think that class is a little overkill for the purpose of posting articles via email, but a similar approach might work.

Hey cool, I thought this was going to be in the too hard / impossible box. Again I am inspired by the MODx community and the ability to find solutions to any problem presented.

I always like a good puzzle. Maybe I should map one of the buttons on my hot-shot mouse to automatically load Google!

Are there any suggestions now, for the easiest way to do it?

I just want to have some Webusers for changing some articles and these should only get the permission to send articles via E-Mail (just cheking the absender adress has the permission) to one folder in - it is just for articles about sportcompetitions, there are allready writing these articles to the press via email and the articles should also appear on our club-homepage. So for the webusers there will be no more work about it (logging in to the website and creating the article). And I can change the clubhomepage from joomla >:( to ModX. .

Thanks in advance.