============
Introduction
============

.. The width and height in points make it look OK in PDF and not take up the
   whole page.

.. image:: singing-dancing.jpg
   :alt: Singing & Dancing Logo by Giuseppe Zizza
   :width: 272pt
   :height: 165pt

*Singing & Dancing* is the next generation newsletter Product for
Plone.  It's an out of the box solution that works without
modification for most of your use cases.  And should you find
something that Singing & Dancing can't do, it's built to be easily
extended via plug-ins using the Zope 3 Component Architecture.

Features
========

Modern and extensible
  Singing & Dancing builds on the latest and greatest efforts in the
  Zope and Plone world.  It makes heavy use of the excellent
  ``z3c.form`` library and the Zope 3 Component Architecture.  This
  allows you to easily plug in and extend Singing & Dancing to fit
  your needs.

Well tested
  An extensive suite of automated tests make Singing & Dancing
  exceptionally stable and reliable.  We currently have 200+ tests.
  Singing & Dancing is not gonna leave you in the lurch!

Fully managable through the Plone interface
  Singing & Dancing is fully usable out of the box.  An extensive
  set of forms reachable through the configuration panel let you as
  the user configure many details of your newsletters, like *when*
  they're sent (periodically or manually), *what* is sent (through the
  use of the *Smart Folder* interface, or manually), and to whom.

Subscriptions
  Singing & Dancing uses *confirmed subscription*, i.e. subscribers
  receive an e-mail to confirm their subscription.  Users can
  subscribe via a standard subscription form that lists all available
  newsletters in the site, or through individual subscription forms,
  e.g. in portlets.

Automatic newsletters
  You can both send newsletters by creating a Page in Plone and send that
  as a newsletter, or have automatic sending out of newsletters regularily
  by collecting for example News items in the site.
  
.. _contact-us:

Contact us
==========

If you have a question, or comment, get in touch with us!  Our
`mailing list`_ is a good place to do so. If you find a bug, please
`let us know`_. We also have an IRC channel called
``#singing-dancing`` on Freenode_.

Donate
======

Developing software as Open Source can be a thankless task sometimes.
If you're a happy user of Singing & Dancing, and you'd like to show your
appreciation, you might want to `donate via PayPal`_.

There's other ways to contribute to the project if you're not a
developer; one is to post a message to the `mailing list`_ describing
any successes or problems that you have with the software.  That's the
only way we can know if S&D is working correctly for you.  Another is
to add a screenshot to the `sites using S&D`_.

.. _mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/singing-dancing
.. _let us know: http://bugs.launchpad.net/singing-dancing/+filebug
.. _Freenode: http://freenode.net
.. _donate via PayPal: http://ur1.ca/2d41
.. _sites using S&D: http://ur1.ca/2d4p