There are two types of newsletters in Singing & Dancing, automatic and manual.
Manual newsletters are simply made by making a standard page document in Plone and sending it as a newsletter. It will then be sent formatted as a newsletter but with the content of the page.
To send a manual newsletter, you create a new Page document. Under the Actions menu you have an action Send as newsletter. Selecting this opens a page where you can select to which mailing-list to send the newsletter, and if it should include collector items or not.
There are two main tabs in the send form, one for sending and one for previewing. The preview tab enables to to show a preview in the browser. This is a good way to verify that you content looks reasonable as a part of the newsletter. The Send tab allows you to send a newsletter to the mailing list.
But mail readers usually have more primitive HTML support than web browsers do, so to make really sure the newsletter looks good you may want to send a preview to your mail address. To do that just type in your email address in the Address to send preview to-field and press Send preview.
When you are ready to send the newsletter, use the Send tab and press send. The newsletter will not be sent immediately, it will be sent when the scheduler is run next. See Mailing-list Administration for more information on how to set up the scheduler.
Automatic newsletter are newsletters that have a collector and a scheduler defined. What happens is that the scheduler will run, typically once a day or once a week, and if there are new items in the collector, not already sent a newsletter will be created including a list of these collector items.
This type of newsletter can send your customers a newsletter once a week with your top news stories without any intervention from your side.
To set up an automatic newsletter, you need to go to the Singing & Dancing control panel. There you create a collector that collects the items you want included. This is typically news items.
You then create a mailing-list that uses this collector, and has a weekly (or daily, if you have lots of news), and you’ll get an automatic newsletter send out once a week with the latest news items.