[Snippet] Newsletter (Improved version from Luca Allulli)

Quote from: Dimmy at Jan 20, 2006, 01:48 PM

???

Description: Database calendar module for MODx

copy/past is nice (;

lol, my bad. I’ll fix it, when we reach 0.1 release, withuot the beta.

Any response yet from testing the system?
Do you guys think it’s better to have captcha for subscribing to the system? Do you think having an option to send html mail with richtexteditor will be awesome? I have a couple idea here, but haven’t got a chance to put those thing in this snippet.

Another thing, I think it’s better to have another snippet called DocumentTools, which contains several features such as "send email to friend", "print page", "show document in pdf", "bookmark page", and etc.

WHat do you guys think? One stop solution for document side tools that might help improving the usability of website build using MODx. Somebody want to take on this project?

rich text based HTML newsletters would be ideal... good stuff!

Hi Wendy,

thank you for your very nice "credits"

You’re very welcome to improve/redesign my Newsletter snippet. I didn’t have the time to look at your new snippet yet. However, here are some old ideas I would have liked to implement, if I had time: feel free to do it yourself, if you haven’t done it already.

* Multiple newsletters. Devote some web user groups (to be specified as snippet parameters) to "newsletter" groups; let web users subscribe/unsubscribe to these groups. When you post a news, you specify to which groups you want it to be sent (if a user belongs to more than one group, only one copy of the message should be sent to him!)

* Rich text editing.

* Page sending confirmation via Rich Text Editor. When you want to send the content of a page as a newsletter, you click on a link. Then the Rich Text Editor opens with the content of the page, letting you edit it, and send it to some newsletter groups, as specified in the first point.

* Integration with Newslisting. When you insert a new Newslisting news, the system offers to send it as a newsletter, too.

One another quick idea for this, based on a module I used with several Nuke forks; it would be cool to create a way to create plugins to be able to pull in any kind of new content from a site, from latest calendar events to latest blog posts, to latest links, etc. Each "plugin" could be defined so that it can be configured to show x number of items (or whatever config options are approriate for the data being pulled by that plugin) and place them into the newsletter body. You might be able to use placeholders in the newsletter body to include content from these different "newsletter content plugins" as selected for your newsletter (ignoring them and removing the leftover placeholders otherwise).

In this way, users could easily create and add their own newsletter content plugins (or whatever you want to call them, plugin is probably a bad choice of words here so as to avoid confusion with MODx plugins in general) for custom content they are maintaining in their MODx site.

Very nice idea to have in the end a multinewsletter possibilty in one site.

Database1: people interest by the ’Tutorials for MODx’.
Database2: people interest by a page ’Design tips with MODx’
Database3: et...
One or more newsletters for each section site or pages.
Sure: Subscribe / Unsubscribe for each newsletter for the same email account.

(sorry for my english ’codage’ )

Now that’s a very *cool* idea and would make for a great newsletter plugin... It would make things way easier to handle newsletter creation

Sorry, it’s been a while since I read this post.

Commodore64, you’re very welcome. Even though I did rewrite the whole code and built it from scratch, but it’s still your idea to come up with this newsletter snippet. So credit still goes to you

Btw, to answer the original author suggestion, the system allow creation of subscription/unsubscription form using chunk, which you will find a hidden field that you can set on which web group the user will be subscribed/unsubscribed to. So this thing able to handle multiple user group for different purposes.

This snippet also provide anchor to be added on each page that will allow user to click on that anchor and being directed to the newsletter admin, and it will use that previous page as the content. The only thing that haven’t been achieved yet is the ability to edit the page/document before it was sent out.

The features that are not being supported right now is the richtexteditor and integration with newslisting.


To answer Jason, I think you’re refering about the mail digest capability. Is that true? It really is a good idea. Is there any place in MODx that already did this automatically? Such as the admin log system? We might be able to harvest the data from that log system and use template to display it nicely. This will be another sub project I believe.


Btw, the Richtexteditor implementation will be a good way to go I believe, and I will add one more select box for html or text mail format. So we can choose the mail format, before we send it out.

I’ll work on this this week or next week maybe.

I just realize that there will be security breach in this snippet. Somebody can post to this snippet, and able to be subscribed into certain web group, as long as they know the web group that they are aiming to.

Any other suggestion to fix this? I’m thinking to check the site domain, if they are coming from the same domain, then it’s a safe call. Any other better idea? (If possible, the easiest solution please, so I don’t have to recode some of the snippet )

Thanks

Maybe I’m confused a little Wendy, and didn’t completely understand how this particular snippet works. Didn’t mean to add any confusion to your effort; it may be that this is a different kind of newsletter than I am thinking of...

I was referring to pnTresMailer (http://canvas.anubix.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=PagEd&file=index&page_id=699), a popular PostNuke module that features newsletters that can be previewed and edited by hand before sending, and includes a plugin system that allows users to pull content into newsletter templates by simply selecting from a list of content sources (be it a calendar events database, the last five blog posts in a folder, the latest comments, an excerpt from a new page, or some other custom source), and configuring each selected plugin to render the wanted content from the source.

What are the groups for again? To be able to send secure content to members of certain web groups?

Quote from: Djamoer at Jan 23, 2006, 07:30 PM

I just realize that there will be security breach in this snippet. Somebody can post to this snippet, and able to be subscribed into certain web group, as long as they know the web group that they are aiming to.

Any other suggestion to fix this?

The following solution should be easy to implement.

The admin creates some web user groups that are dedicated to the newsletter snippet only. They represent the "distribution lists" of the newsletter. For example, he creates groups "Math", "History", "English".

In the snippet call the admin specifies which groups are to be considered newletter groups. So web users will be allowed to subscribe only to those groups only.

Example: [[Newsletter ? newsgroups=array("Math","History","English")]]