Im thinking about newsletter creation from within modx - about an easy way to have a page, that collects random recently added other pages on the site, that eg. can be printed to pdf and mailed out. I imagine the way this to be done is by the following steps:
- among others there is a directory, that contains newsletters
- when I create a directory within that one, its set up from a template
- below of it, there are only links to other parts of the cms
- they all display on one page (the newsletter)
- they can be sorted
- they know their parent, from where they actually live
- so they can show their respective parent as a header
- consecutive links with the same parent collapse, only one header is shown
it should not be more complicated than making a merge mail in word. no typing, preferably just drag’n’drop. anybody care to advise me how to reach that, and on what I would have to program? Im fluent in php, yet do not know the modx vocabulary at all.
Thank You.
Peter
Ditto will aggregate the articles for you and display them on a web page. One approach would be to pass the ditto output to a snippet that would use something like FPDF to create the .PDF file.
http://www.fpdf.org/
Possibly a better way would be to put the FPDF code in a plugin that would convert the actual web page containing the ditto results into a PDF file. I suspect that it will involve a lot of frustrating trial and error to get a good-looking PDF document, but I don’t doubt that it can be done.
You can use PhpMailer to e-mail the .PDF file for you, although it might be easier to use PhpList or one of the MODx mailing list snippets like KoopsMailingListX or Easy Newsletter instead.
If you don’t have to have them in .PDF format, you could save a ton of time and trouble by just having a nice looking page with a Ditto call on it and saving that page as .html from your web browser, then sending the resulting .html file with one of the mailing list options mentioned above.
Bob
ow about using phplist, a stand alone newsletter server application.
It can grep a url and send it as newsletter out.
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I’ve used Dada mail. It’s a perl script; very powerful. It was quite simple to make a module with links to the Dada control panel, which displays nicely in the main frame of the MODx manager. You can send a specified web page as the mail. It’s extremely configurable via a single config file. It does use its own subscription database, but it’s a flat-file, so you could easily enough use a plugin to write to the flat-file when registering or removing users from the MODx user system.
