[archived] Postmaster -- A simple email-on-post / newsletter manager

pieman · 2006-11-14 13:30:56

This looks seriously useful! Hardly any of my clients can work phpList properly, and this looks like it might be an ideal, very usable, substitute.

So shoot me if this question is obvious (cos it says “Postmaster v4.0.4.0.2: A simple email-on-post / newsletter manager for Textpattern” in the initial post) but will this run with 4.03?

I’ve installed OK, set-up and subscibed to my own list OK, but the Custom Data Tags like <txp:bab_pm_data display="excerpt" /> output nothing for me in the mailout or the article page. So I’m wondering if it’s a 4.03 thing. :-/ There’s too little time and too many hacks to jeopardise think about upgrading before launch.

my form is
You can read the article at: <txp:bab_pm_data display="link" />. <txp:bab_pm_unsubscribeLink /> <h1><txp:bab_pm_data display="title" /></h1> <txp:bab_pm_data display="excerpt" /> <txp:bab_pm_data display="body" /> <em><txp:bab_pm_data display="author" /></em>

but my mailout is entirely blank (except for the subject line)
and may article page shows everything in the form template, but with no data from the custom tags.

any help appreciated

joebaich · 2006-11-14 14:29:06

Ben and David,

Very many thanks for your suggestions. The pdf attachments in this case are standalone certified documents and are not TXP articles. The wan_pdf plug-in route therefore is not appropriate for this requirement as that provides a link to a pdf version of a TXP article it generates. In my case, the TXP article is the covering letter (email) for the pdf document.

Also, the subscribers to this facility on the site are specifically signing up to receive the certified pdf documents bearing information that is of interest to them as potential or exisiting investors in the company. That is the way this aspect of business is done in this industry and therefore is a given.

I think that I will invetigate using the excellent subscription / unsubscription facility provided by your plug in, Ben and some other method of emailing out the attachments.

Anyway, thank you very much for your interest.

Kind regards

Joe

benbruce · 2006-11-15 01:12:55

joe,

It sounded like you knew the .pdfs had to be attachments, but figured I’d give the link-to-the-.pdf solution a shot … attachments are a good idea, though.

pieman,

Hmm. I’ve tested this plugin on 4.0.4 and 4.0.3, but it’s possible there’s something there.

I grabbed your form, entered it on a site running 4.0.3 and Postmaster, and I received the mail with the content in there, so I think the trouble is somewhere else.

Other possibilities:

Have you associated the form with the list (in TXP > extensions > Postmaster > Lists)?
Are you writing the custom tags into the form, and then writing content in the article? From what you wrote above, it looks like your form is set up ok … are you then writing an article, and filling out the title and the body with regular content (not the custom tags)? I couldn’t be exactly sure but it sounded like you might be placing the custom tags in the article as well.

Last edited by benbruce (2006-11-15 04:58:57)

pieman · 2006-11-15 10:21:14

Hi Ben
It was a schoolboy error on my part! I’d associated the form with the list, then changed the name of the form and not updated the list prefs. Duh.
All is looking rosy now. Thanks again – I’m really loving this plugin :)

pieman · 2006-11-16 12:57:44

Ben
I’ve been feeling my way around this… the help notes are excellent I should say, but there’s a few things I can’t quite figure.
Before I go hacking around in the plugin source, I thought I’d ask you incase some of these features already exist, but I’m missing something.

mailout title
Is there any way to put the article title into the mailout title?

admin notifications
Can the list manager receive notifications when a subscriber joins or leaves the list?

subscriber notifications
I set copysender=“no” in my ZCR form, but when I subscribe myself I still get sent an email. A confirmation email is good, but I’d like to define what goes in it. Is that possible? At the moment, it’s lacking a personal touch ;)

Your Name:: << my name >>
Your Email:: << my email >>
list: << list name >>
This is not Spam. : yes

Textile
I only want to send plain text emails, but I’d like to use Textile to style up the message for when it’s viewed in the site.
Is the best way to acheive this to write separate Excerpt and Body messages (as descibed in the #text_linkToHTML part of the plugin help)?
Instead, would it be possible to write a unified article (Textiled excerpt & body) and strip out the Textile (via the email form) before it’s sent?

unsubscribing
I wrote an article called ‘unsubscribe’, put a personal message in the excerpt, and the <txp:bab_pm_unsubscribe /> tag in the article body.
It works, but the help says

“Note that this tag does not output anything to the page at all — if you place it in an article with nothing else, the article will appear empty.”

which is all good, though if I click on an ‘unsubscribe_link’ in an email (using the messy URL) it says “deleted.” Is there a way to stop that?

Finally, if someone wants to unsubscribe without clicking through from an email, how do I enable that – write an unsubscribe form in my page template to appear only for the Unsubscribe page?

That’s a bit to get through I know… any help appreciated :)

Stu

benbruce · 2006-11-16 18:04:29

Stu,

It’s a lot of questions — all good — and it all helps fill out our knowledge here. Some of these answers should be in the help (but aren’t). So here goes:

mailout title
Is there any way to put the article title into the mailout title?

The quick answer is yes. This should be made more explicit in the help text, but the sub-tabs under TXP > extensions > Postmaster do not show every field … you have to select an item to edit in order to see all the fields associated with that item (it was just a matter of making the front page clean). So to add the article title to the subject line of a list, click ‘edit’ next to the list you want to edit, and then in the field “Subject Line:” enter the TXP tag “@<txp:title />@. That should do it.

admin notifications
Can the list manager receive notifications when a subscriber joins or leaves the list?

The ZCR form will send you an email when someone subscribes from the form, so enter your admin email address in that tag and you will be notified when someone subscribes. Unsubscribes is a different matter, and not built into the script. We’ll have to add that to a list of possible enhancements.

subscriber notifications
I set copysender=“no” in my ZCR form, but when I subscribe myself I still get sent an email. A confirmation email is good, but I’d like to define what goes in it. Is that possible? At the moment, it’s lacking a personal touch ;)

Here I’m relying on the Zem_Contact_Reborn plugin, which is also fairly extensively documented. Have you read through the ZCR “help” section?

Textile
I only want to send plain text emails, but I’d like to use Textile to style up the message for when it’s viewed in the site.
Is the best way to acheive this to write separate Excerpt and Body messages (as descibed in the #text_linkToHTML part of the plugin help)?
Instead, would it be possible to write a unified article (Textiled excerpt & body) and strip out the Textile (via the email form) before it’s sent?

Hmm … I see what you mean with this. Will you test what happens when you simply write the article with Textile and then send it as a text email? It’s possible that the tags will not appear in the text, I don’t know. If not, then you should be good to go. If they do appear in the email, then the solution for now is to write two versions; This would be another good item to add to the To Do list — it could be a checkbox on the “write” tab.

it says “deleted.” Is there a way to stop that?

This should be gone. It’s hardcoded in the code, so you could changed it to “return;” if you know php, or else I’ll have to go make an update — I want it to actually show nothing publicly, so that’s a nice catch.

Finally, if someone wants to unsubscribe without clicking through from an email, how do I enable that – write an unsubscribe form in my page template to appear only for the Unsubscribe page?

You are able to do this using a ZCR form. Check the default form in the help to see how to build that (the default has both subscribe and unsubscribe in it).

Hope that helps,

– Ben

pieman · 2006-11-16 19:01:22

Hi Ben
thanks for getting back

Is there any way to put the article title into the mailout title?
The quick answer is yes… add the article title to the subject line of a list, click ‘edit’ next to the list you want to edit, and then in the field “Subject Line:” enter the TXP tag “@<txp:title />@. That should do it.

Hmmm. I tried that and nothing was output where the title should be. Has anyone else tried this? I’d be interested to hear…
It may or may not be a plugin isssue, as the site I’m working on has had it’s core files fairly extensively hacked by myself. Debug ain’t pretty!

Have you read through the ZCR “help” section?

I have but, not thoroughly enough. I’ll delve further into the ZCR docs and see how far I get – it seems like a great bit of work on first impression.

Hmm … I see what you mean with this. Will you test what happens when you simply write the article with Textile and then send it as a text email? It’s possible that the tags will not appear in the text, I don’t know. If not, then you should be good to go. If they do appear in the email, then the solution for now is to write two versions; This would be another good item to add to the To Do list — it could be a checkbox on the “write” tab.

I tested with basic Textile in the excerpt and body (and both in the email template) and they just get output as you write them – no parsing or stripping.

Maybe that’s one for the hit list – it would make writing and sending much less of a pain if you could write it only once, as you would a normal article.
Of course you could also say that you should probably write differently in each case – because if you know that you’re writing for plain text, you can use caps and other techniques for giving it a bit of structure and styling. So for now I’m going to go for plain text in the excerpt/email and the same copy Textiled up in the body/page.

This should be gone. It’s hardcoded in the code, so you could changed it to “return;” if you know php, or else I’ll have to go make an update — I want it to actually show nothing publicly, so that’s a nice catch.

OK, I edited the plugin like so:
line 780, changed return 'Deleted.'; to return '';
line 813, changed return 'Deleted.'; to return '';
now nothing gets output, as I hoped

Hope that helps,

indeed it does
thanks again

benbruce · 2006-11-16 21:12:50

pieman,

re: the subject line — You know what? I knew the TXP tags wouldn’t work there; it slipped my mind. Try using the Custom Data Tag instead and see if that works:

<txp:bab_pm_data display="title" />

Ben

maniqui · 2006-11-17 17:27:06

Great plug-in, Ben!
Recently installed and still going thru the help and thinking the different ways of implementing it.

I would like to know if this is possible:
In the “Contact” section of a site, I want to use ZCR for the contact form. I would like to use it as a “suscribe to Postmaster” form by adding a checkbox to the contact form.
If the checkbox is unticked, ZCR will just send the e-mail as a simple contact form does.
If the checkbox is ticked, ZCR will just send the e-mail as a simple contact form does AND also add the sender to the suscribers list.

That way, when someone want to contact us, he/she would also have the chance to suscribe to the newsletter.

I have already implemented the ZCR as contact form, but there is no problem if I have to make changes to that form to achieve what I’m looking for.

Is this possible?

Thanks again.

maniqui · 2006-11-18 02:14:34

Well… still testing slowly… everything seems to work as I go through each step of the configuration…

I have another question:
Right now, all the texts (for example, when a user submit a subscription form) are picked up from zem_contact_lang plug-in.
The problem is: the meanings of the phrases I have there are more contact-form oriented than subscriber-form oriented.
So, when a subscription form is submitted, the “thank you” message says something like: “Thank you for contacting us. You will receive a copy of the e-mail sent.” and that is a bit confusing.

I would like to know if it is possible to customize the phrases that the subscription form will use…
In the meanwhile, I will go thru the PM plug-in code to see if there is anything there… :D

Thanks again.

maniqui · 2006-11-19 02:43:14

Hi.
Still grasping this great plug-in…
The plug-in help is really very helpful and complete, but questions and comments and ideas and features arises.

Comments

pieman wrote:

subscriber notifications
I set copysender=“no” in my ZCR form, but when I subscribe myself I still get sent an email. A confirmation email is good, but I’d like to define what goes in it. Is that possible? At the moment, it’s lacking a personal touch ;)

I haven’t explicitly set copysender attribute in ZCR and I dont get a copy when I subscribe my self. You could try that.

benbruce wrote:

You are able to do this using a ZCR form. Check the default form in the help to see how to build that (the default has both subscribe and unsubscribe in it).

In the default form… it isn’t there ;)
The line <txp:zem_contact_text name="zemUnSubscribe" label="Unsubscribe:" required="no"><br> hasn’t been properly encoded in the Help so you have to view the Help Page source code to find it out.

Questions

How can I make the form to default the subscription to one predefined list?
The default form suggests this implementation:
<txp:zem_contact_select list="default,test" selected="default" name="zemSubscriberLists" label="Your List:" />
That’s fine if you plan to have more than one list. But I want to simplify things at the beggining… I think I won’t use more than one list.
So, how can I add a hidden input (or whatever is needed) with a default value so subscribers automatically get subscribed to the “default” list?

Can test@test and testrow be safely deleted?
I think testrow has been imported from the previous NL management.

Bugs

I dont know if this is exactly a bug, but from time to time (I havent find ouf how to reproduce it) a totally blank entry is added to subscribers list.

Ideas/Features

Order subscribers list by an assigned incremental id number (or date, but I dont think that subscription date is saved in the DB) so you can see the last added subscribers.

In the “Contact” section of a site, I want to use ZCR for the contact form. I would like to use it as a “suscribe to Postmaster” form by adding a checkbox to the contact form.
If the checkbox is unticked, ZCR will just send the e-mail as a simple contact form does.
If the checkbox is ticked, ZCR will just send the e-mail as a simple contact form does AND also add the sender to the suscribers list.

I’m not a programmer (not even know what PHP stands for) but I was thingking about how to implement this.
Please, tell me if anything of this makes any sense:

create a new name value name="zemSuscribe".
if it isn’t explicitly added or if it’s added to a form in a hidden <input /> element, the subscription will work as it does currently.
but that new name value could be also added to a checkbox <input /> element, and only if checked the subscription will be effectively done.

Well, that’s all by now.
Thanks!

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#25 2006-11-14 13:30:56

Re: [archived] Postmaster -- A simple email-on-post / newsletter manager

#26 2006-11-14 14:29:06

Re: [archived] Postmaster -- A simple email-on-post / newsletter manager

#27 2006-11-15 01:12:55

Re: [archived] Postmaster -- A simple email-on-post / newsletter manager

#28 2006-11-15 10:21:14

Re: [archived] Postmaster -- A simple email-on-post / newsletter manager

#29 2006-11-16 12:57:44

Re: [archived] Postmaster -- A simple email-on-post / newsletter manager

#30 2006-11-16 18:04:29

Re: [archived] Postmaster -- A simple email-on-post / newsletter manager

#31 2006-11-16 19:01:22

Re: [archived] Postmaster -- A simple email-on-post / newsletter manager

#32 2006-11-16 21:12:50

Re: [archived] Postmaster -- A simple email-on-post / newsletter manager

#33 2006-11-17 17:27:06

Re: [archived] Postmaster -- A simple email-on-post / newsletter manager

#34 2006-11-18 02:14:34

Re: [archived] Postmaster -- A simple email-on-post / newsletter manager

#35 2006-11-19 02:43:14

Re: [archived] Postmaster -- A simple email-on-post / newsletter manager

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