NewsletterXT
Newsletter creation and management module for Typolight

Hi everyone

I'd like to make an official announcement that I have begun working on a new module which builds upon the basic newsletter module given to us by Leo and adds some features as requested by the community. Below is a list of news features that will be implemented. Comments and suggestions are encouraged!

Features

- Support for separate administrator emails for each newsletter channel (or fall-back to default site admin email)

- Newsletter contact export tool (channel-specific whole-list or partial export, support for first and last name preceding email addresses)

- Newsletter Template Support - Utilizing TinyMCE inline styles option for mail client compliance. Will also attempt to insert any compatibility tags style="display:block;" inline for images as this corrects display issues in rich client apps

- Preview and Send Test Emails

- Will attempt to enforce support and consistent display for the following email clients (not limited to those shown).

Rich Client Email Apps
- Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Windows Live

Console Email Clients
- Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac standard mail client, Entourage, Lotus (eek!)

I will always need testing of additional mail clients to ensure maximum compatibility, so if you use something not on the list, let me know so we can test it!

If you have further features you would like to request, please do so here!

Best,

Fred

Hi fbliss

This sounds really promissing, looking forward beeing able to send images with my newsletters. When do u think it will be up and running?

kind regards

T

I often use the newsletter to send messages to members. I would love to use their names (as specified in the members data) to have a personalized newsletters (e.g. Hi FRED, this is our latest newsletter...).

We had a discussion about this in the German forum and people were saying that not all newsletter recipients are members too (I totally agree with this) and because of this personalized messages are not possible. So what would happen to those recipients where no name is stored in the database? I am not a programmer but could'nt this be checked before and if there is no name stored then a "standard" adress will be taken?! Do You understand where I am aiming at?

Hi Guys,

I've been quite busy on a few other projects and havent' yet been able to devote time to NeXT since I started, but it is in active development. My goal is to have a first version by May.

Fab, the short answer to your questions are all "yes". The logic can be easily built in to check for an existing user name or not. Doing it efficiently would require a different approach to building the newsletter subscriber list - it would require differentiating between a recipient that is also a member or just a plain recipient. A while back I asked Leo if he would add first name and last name to the core tl_newsletter-recipients table but he declined to do that for certain reasons (for the sake of brevity I won't go into it here).

NeXT will most likely have its own subscriber table that will support names since Leo has elected to not integrate names into the core for recipients. This would allow us to drop in names from those who are signing up as members when they are being added to the recipient list(s).

So, that is the tentative plan. I could also add a couple fields to the tl_newsletter_recipients table but that would require a modification to dcaconfig.php which I don't prefer to use (I like my modules to be completely encapsulated)

Great feedback, guys. Keep it coming! The goal is to offer an enterprise-level tool so do be shy with your suggestions.

Greetings,
Fred

Hi Fred, thanks for Your answer.

Another thing comes to my mind. I tried to insert an HTML-Newsletter that I built using a normal html-editor. I couldn't get it to work and used another newsletter-tool instead. Would it be possible to have an option whether to use the tinyMCE or just plain html-code? So in case I have a newsletter-template I can just insert the code and in other cases I could create the newsletter using the wysiwyg-editor...

Hi Fab,

If you look to the far right on the TinyMCE toolbar, there is the HTML button which enables you to insert regular HTML code into the article. There may be some tag restrictions, but nothing that you would use in an HTML email anyway (I.E. no Javascript) In addition, you will actually end up having two editors - one for a full HTML email and another for text-only email in case a subscriber prefers plain text emails.

Cheers,

Fred

Hi Fred,

I know the HTML-Editor but I thought that it has some filtering of certain tags. Anyway, You're right, this should be enough..

Another question: Would it be possible to provie an online-page with just the newsletter in case people can't view it and I could then provide a link saying "If You have trouble displaying the email, please click here" with a link to www.mycompany.com/newsletter1_1.html

Regards
Fabian

Hi Fab

Yes, that would be possible and will be included.

Fred

Fred,
What if the Newsletter could automatically created a News Feed that could be deployed exactly how the News is deployed now in TL?

Hi Logan

Doable. Not a problem actually. I'll add it to the list!

Fred

hi fabster.

perhaps a look at my invitation module will help you temporarily. I was thinking of integrating it with Newsletters, but my case, it was important to keep it seperate.

The invitation module's focus is on sending HTML packages (.html and its graphic files), where you can define a list of people to send a preview to, select a recipient list of names (.txt) and attach files.

Sounds good, I will give it a try next time a need a preview feature for the newsletter.

Hi Thyon,

When I get this project running perhaps we could talk about integrating this in?

Thanks guys!

ok, you can rip the code from my Invitation module of course.

I needed the Invitation module seperate, because I develop invitations for event companies, where people are invited to an event from many different lists. Since, its not a Newsletter, and has nothing to do with newsletters, it made sense to keep it separate.

It would be great to incorporate the HTML page link and the preview e-mail feature into Newsletter, as it would be great to just select a file to use a newsletter and also it would be nice to have the option to send to a few pre-defined test e-mails to see it its all ok, before doing a bulk send.

Sending to a list of recipients in a TXT file, doesn't fit into the membership concept, so that feature might not make sense.

Sounds good, Thyon. A test function is actually already on the list of features so we can check it before sending to the masses.

NeXT will allow people to send to an external list stored in a text file if they choose, although they may just want to import those emails and maintain the list in TL. I won't assume either way. I will include that sort of a feature because many people will have existing lists already when they get their shiny, new TL site built, and we don't want to preclude them from being able to easily send to their existing list. The only other consideration is size of lists - larger mailings may require some help from your hosting provider to ensure you aren't getting flagged for spamming by sending tons of emails. I've seen some strange rules in the past that have caused issues with large mailings.

Regards,

Fred