When you talk about newsletters it can often be confusing as the word “newsletter” is to denote two different things. It’s both used for the think you subscribe to, and to each issue of the newsletter that gets send out.
In Singing & Dancing you therefore don’t subscribe to newletters, you subscribe to “channels”, and the word “newsletter” refer to only the letter that subscribers recieve.
So the next thing you need to do is to set up a channel, so you can have subscribers.
You set up channels in the Plone Configuration panel, under the Singing & Dancing configuration heading. When you make a fresh install you will under the Channel administration heading find one channel, called Newsletter. Here you can change the title or set the newsletter as not being subscribeable. You’ll also see the Collector and Scheduler settings, ignore them for now, we’ll discuss them under Sending newsletters.
You can also on the same page add new newsletters. But for now, click on the Newsletter link under the title of the default newsletter. The page you come to here have four parts, Subscribers, Edit, Composers and Preview. The first page is the subscribers page, where you can add or delete subscribers from the channel. The Edit page has again the settings for collector and Scheduler but also a full text field where you can add a description of the newsletter. Preview enables you to see a preview of the newsletter once configured.
The most interesting part of the channel configuration is the Composer page. Here you can change how the newsletter looks and some other information. You can enter what name and email address that will be used to send the letter. If you don’t enter anything here the site administrators name and email as configured in Plone will be used, but often you want something dedicated for the newsletters. You can also set up a reply-to address, if you want it to be different that the sending email address.
You can also change the subject, and add a “header text”, a text that will be included first in all the newsletters sent, and a footer text, that naturally will appear last in the newsletter.
For the subject, footer and header you can insert dynamic text that will be generated when the newsletter is sent. The variables to do that is
| Variable | What it results in |
|---|---|
| ${channel} | The channel id, ex newsletter |
| ${channel_title} | The channel title, ex Our Newsletter |
| ${site_url} | The URL to the site, ex http://www.yoursite.com/ |
| ${site_title} | The title of the site, ex YourSite.com |
| ${subject} | The subject as defined in the subject field |
| ${stylesheet} | The CSS stylesheet |
| ${from_addr} | The address in the From address field |
| ${to_addr} | The address the mail is sent to |
| ${unsubscribe_url} | A link to an unsubscribe form |
| ${my_subscriptions_url} | A link with an overview of all the subscriptions of the recipient |
Last on the Composer page you have a field for CSS where you can change the HTML styling of the newsletter as you want. You also have a Template field where you can select what template you want. With templates you have detailed and complete control over the newsletters look. This is useful if you want to have a very specific design for your newsletters. Usually you only have one template, called Default. Creating more templates is advanced development and will be covered in the Developing Singing & Dancing section.
For each channel you can select a scheduler. The Schedulers decide when automatic newsletters get sent out. Built in to Singing & Dancing is Daily, Weekly, Timed and Manual schedulers.
The manual scheduler is simply the scheduler used when you don’t want to send the newsletters automatically, but instead send them manually.
The timed scheduler is used for sending newsletters at specific times. When you have a newsletter channel set up to use the timed scheduler you’ll get to choose a date and time for the sending. This way you can prepare a newsletter, but only send it out at a specific time in the future.
Collectors are also used mainly for automatic newsletters. They are standard Plone collections, and used the same way. You define a set of rules for what should be collected, and these items will be used to create the newsletter.
The typical usecase for this is to make a collector that includes all the news items on the site. If you then set up a channel using the news collector with a weekly schedule, you’ll get each week a newsletter with links to all the newsitems.
Under the Subscribers tab in the channel administration you can add and delete subscribers. You can add subscribers either one by one, by adding the email address in the E-mail Address field and clicking Add, or by uploading a file with a list of email addresses.
You will also see a list of all subscribers that you can search, and where you can delete subscribers.
If you want visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, there is a portlet you can add to the site that makes it easy for visitors to subscribe to your newsletters.
Go to the front page of the site, and click the Manage portlets link. Click the Add portlet... drop down and selecting Channel subscribe portlet to add a portlet. Here you can set a header, like “Subscribe to our newsletter!”, wich channel to subscribe to. You can also add a footer.
This portlet will then show up everywhere on your site, making it easy for visitors to get your news.