[Snippet] Newsletter (Improved version from Luca Allulli)

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[Djamoer]

Name: Newsletter (Improved version from Luca Allulli)
For: MODx cms (modxcms.com)
Description: Database calendar module for MODx
Version: 0.2b
Written by: Wendy Novianto
Created: 1/18/2006
Modified: 1/19/2006

Fully Tested on MODx v0.9.1

Added RichTextEditor and HTML Editing option, before sending the newsletter out, if it's fetch from a page.


Hi,

I'm not trying to duplicate somebody else snippet, but I took Luca Allulli snippet and make it as an example for me to start building the newsletter from scratch. Ever since he is the pioneer, so credit still goes to him, even though the code is totally different, but the concept is still the same.

Things to note, this will use web user groups as the newsletter database, and allowing extra field as a textarea to insert more email into it. It's also able to copy the exact page view of the given document/page id and send it through email. So the newsletter template can be handled by the MODx engine.

Here is the full features listing, as well as the testing site.
http://test.djamoer.net/newsletter.html
Username: newsletter
Password: djamoer

Please try it out and report to me if you guys found anything weird going on with the snippet, which is what we usually call bugs

I tested for a while, but I haven't fully tested the system capability of sending a lot of emails to users. If somebody willing to help me out as the beta tester, please let me know the end result of it.

Regards,

[Djamoer]

Mark, I think it's better to approach it as a snippet rather than a module, so I came up with this approach.

Sorry for not continuing the modules that you've built.

[davidm]

Wendy, I am amazed by all the things you come up with lately !
Man, are you hyperactive or what ??

Anyway, I'll try this one out and report any problems I might encounter. I am glad to see this snippet being updated again, not to mention, improved

[Briggsy]

Wicked..... I'm going to need a way to keep visitors updated of changes. Was going to run a separate Mailman annoucment list, but this might just do the trick, especially since it will send the updated page to the recipients.  Nice!

I'll have to play with it once you get the user database sorted. Not sure how it will work as the recipients may or may not have an existing web account which accesses other stuff.

So if they subscribe to the newsletter, and it just adds them to another group or something, that should work. However if it gives them a default web user account that would be bad, as that gives other access and I don't allow people to register for new accounts.

Guess I'll just wait and see

[Mark]

Wendy, my version was going to be a snippet in the end as well. I just coded the backend first (as a module) so that the code was cleaner. Did you ever try mine?

[Djamoer]

Wendy, my version was going to be a snippet in the end as well. I just coded the backend first (as a module) so that the code was cleaner. Did you ever try mine?

Yeap I did. I just found out that adding a more system to organize the template for the newsletter will add more task to achieve what I need right now. So I just use the current document/page on MODx to do the tricks. Later when I have some time, I will try to think of a better architecture in having this as a full-fledge newsletter system, like what you're planning to do, and we can work together on that

Wendy, I am amazed by all the things you come up with lately !
Man, are you hyperactive or what Wink ??

Ehm David, it's not that I'm hyperactive, it's just that I need to extend MODx to meet my project. Hope somebody will help me in improving the snippet for both newsletter and calendar.

I'll have to play with it once you get the user database sorted. Not sure how it will work as the recipients may or may not have an existing web account which accesses other stuff.

So if they subscribe to the newsletter, and it just adds them to another group or something, that should work. However if it gives them a default web user account that would be bad, as that gives other access and I don't allow people to register for new accounts.

What I'm planning to do with the user subscription part, it will just be the extended part of the websignup snippet. The only different, you need to choose the web group default for the signup, and make their username as their email address, and their password will be a random string which later can be reset, if you need to transfer the current newsletter user into your website user later on. This is the plan that Mark and the rest of the core team came up with, and I'm just trying to finish up their idea. So credit should go to Mark, Luca, and the rest of the core team.

Regards,

[Djamoer]

The first beta release of the snippet. It's suppose to be called done, but I haven't tested the capability of sending it to a lot of multiple users.

Please report back to me if somebody willing to beta tested this.

Regards,

[MOZx]

Congratulation, you've been subscribed to the system.

3 times, 3 congratulations: it's a lucky day

Thanks you a lot for this very expected snippet.

[Djamoer]

Well, I actually want to make a validity check, to make sure that the user is on the group already or not, but it seems to me that it will be a lot of processing power again, because it needs to do a couple trip back to the database.

NOTE: When you unsubscribed, you're not being removed from the system, but you only going to be removed from the web group of the newsletter. f you decided to subscribed again, it will actually put you in to the group again, and this process can be repeated several times. The bad thing is, the system will use your email address as the username, so if you are a users of the web user, and you use a username different from your email address, then it will create a new accunt, when you subscribed to the newsletetr with email address as the username.

[Dimmy]

Description: Database calendar module for MODx

copy/past is nice (;

[Djamoer]

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?

[rthrash]

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

[Commodore64]

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.

[OpenGeek]

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.

[MOZx]

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' )