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sde_newsletter: HTML newsletter publishing plug-in
The development of this plug-in was sponsored by Small Dog Electronics, Inc.
This plug-in adds an interface to the extensions tab to allow one to send plain text, HTML-only, or multipart (plain text & HTML, combined) emails from within the Textpattern admin interface. Allows easy selection of any Textpattern user as the email sender.
Ideally, you’d use this plug-in to send to a mailing list handler to take care of the bulk delivery.
Change Log
v0.5.3 Alphabetically sorts Textpattern users pop-up menu by email address.
v0.5.2 Resolved issue w/removal of line endings in email subject that caused occasional collapsed/missing spaces.
v0.5.1 Resolved issue parsing page title containing line breaks from HTML content.
v0.5 Word wraps HTML & text body content to 78 characters to prevent long lines being hard wrapped at 998 characters (which tends to break HTML).
v0.4 Decodes HTML entities in plain-text content (subject & body).
v0.3 Initial public release.
v0.2 Initial multipart MIME message support.
v0.1 Initial development.
More info can be found on the makkintosshu development page.
Direct download: sde_newsletter-0.5.3.txt (current) 2013-01-21
Last edited by morgant (2013-01-21 18:27:12)
Morgan Aldridge
http://www.makkintosshu.com/
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Re: sde_newsletter: HTML newsletter publishing plug-in
Great! Thanks!
I will have to play a little with this little new friend, because Postmaster (a great Txp plug-in for writing/sending newsletter and managing subscriptions, by Ben Bruce) seems to be abandonware (I hope not, because both the plug-in and Ben are great).
Maybe you can take a look at Postmaster and see if there is something you could pick for improving your new thing.
Thanks.
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Re: sde_newsletter: HTML newsletter publishing plug-in
This plug-in was written to take on the task from a different direction than Postmaster, but I’ll definitely be keeping my eyes open for additional modifications and improvements. If I end up using postmaster in any of my solutions, I’ll definitely look at providing updates to it as well.
Morgan Aldridge
http://www.makkintosshu.com/
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Re: sde_newsletter: HTML newsletter publishing plug-in
I have tried this plug-in now and find that it does a great job. I do like the idea of keeping it slim and using an external mailing list to get the message out. I have now added it to a live site so that the company secretary can get an occasional message out to shareholders. It seems very well suited to that kind of task.
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Re: sde_newsletter: HTML newsletter publishing plug-in
Excellent. I’m glad you found it helpful.
Morgan Aldridge
http://www.makkintosshu.com/
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Re: sde_newsletter: HTML newsletter publishing plug-in
v0.4 has been released. See original post for the download link.
Morgan Aldridge
http://www.makkintosshu.com/
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Re: sde_newsletter: HTML newsletter publishing plug-in
How do you use this?
I’ve installed it and can see the interface under the extensions tab – but what do I do?
I can make it send a html email – which is superb :)
But how do I send it to a list, how do I incorporate my mailing list?
(apologies if this is obvious)
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Re: sde_newsletter: HTML newsletter publishing plug-in
tye wrote:
I can make it send a html email – which is superb :)
But how do I send it to a list, how do I incorporate my mailing list?
(apologies if this is obvious)
Ah, you’ve discovered the best feature of this plug-in: you can use it with any mailing list software you want! Unfortunately, this is probably not obvious in the slightest, esp. considering the lack of built-in documentation.
The truth is, there are probably too many mailing list solutions out there and the hardest problem to solve is picking one. We moved from using the now-unsupported LetterRip under Mac OS X to using it with mailman under Linux (with the MySQLMemberAdaptor ; we may migrate it back to Mac OS X at some point).
Of course, for newsletters we have mailman configured to only accept messages from an admin address and requiring moderation. Our newsletters are opt-in, require confirmation, and anyone can unsubscribe at any time. All of that functionality it built into mailman.
I won’t say that it didn’t require some hacking to make mailman function the way we wanted it to, but it works. We picked it because we were authoring & formatting the newsletters using Textpattern, sending newsletter issues as email using sde_newsletter, but we just needed something to actually do the bulk mailing.
There are many other mailing list tools out there, everything from OS-specific apps which help you format & send an HTML newsletter to those like mailman that are purely mailing list senders with a little management functionality but can be bent to do newsletters. I’d love to hear what other tools people are using or have tried.
Sorry if all that is not much help.
Morgan Aldridge
http://www.makkintosshu.com/
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Re: sde_newsletter: HTML newsletter publishing plug-in
Well – that is sort of helpful – so basically you need an external mailing program which you then send a trigger to which actions your mailing list sending function…
OK – I’ll look into it
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#10 2010-09-01 14:42:45
- mlarino
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- Registered: 2007-06-29
- Posts: 367
Re: sde_newsletter: HTML newsletter publishing plug-in
Building a mailing list I think would be essential for this plugin.
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Re: sde_newsletter: HTML newsletter publishing plug-in
Yes, it’s specifically designed to be paired with a mailing list or other newsletter sending service.
Morgan Aldridge
http://www.makkintosshu.com/
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Re: sde_newsletter: HTML newsletter publishing plug-in
Version 0.5 is now available. It’s a very minor update which just fixes wrapping issues which can break some HTML emails by word-wrapping (which is non-destructive, so doesn’t break HTML or links and allows them to be longer if needed) the HTML & text content to 78 characters.
Update: Actually, it turns out there was a minor bug preventing proper parsing the page title out of the HTML content if the TITLE element contained a line break, so that has been resolved in v0.5.1.
Another Update: There was also a minor bug in removing line endings from the email subject that caused the occasional collapsed/missing space, so that has been resolved in v0.5.1.
Last edited by morgant (2011-07-06 17:23:29)
Morgan Aldridge
http://www.makkintosshu.com/
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