Welcome to EasyNewsletter’s documentation!

What is it?

EasyNewsletter is a simple but powerful newsletter/mailing product for Plone.

Features

  • Support Text and HTML Newsletter (including images)
  • Support manual written Newsletters/Mailings
  • Plonish (can use Plone’s Collections to collect content)
  • Variable templates to generate newsletter content
  • Subscribing / Unsubscribing and can use Plone Members/Groups as receivers (works also with Membrane)
  • support for external subscriber sources (configured through a Zope utility)
  • support for external delivery services (other than Plone MailHost)
  • TTW customizeable output Template to generate nice HTML Newsletter
  • Support personalized mails
  • mass import/export subscribers via csv
  • support external filtering/manipulation (filter out or add more subscribers) plugins

Requirements

  • [inqbus.plone.fastmemberproperties] speed up access of member properties (optional, you can installed it with Products.EasyNewsletter[all] in your buidlout eggs list)

Plone 3.X (tested) or 4.X (tested)

Installation

  1. Add Products.EasyNewsletter to your buildout
  2. Run your buildout script
  3. Restart Zope
  4. Install EasyNewsletter via Plone Management Interface
  5. Add an “Newsletter Subscriber” portlet and select the EasyNewsletter (To this newsletter the subscribers will be added).

Usage

General

You can use EasyNewsletter to manually create mailings/newsletters or you can use the collection criteria to collect content.

EasyNewsletter is heavily based on Plone’s Collections. In fact, the Newsletter as well as the Issues are actually specialized Collections.

Hence you can use familiar criteria to decide which content should be part of a newsletter.

It’s a feature of Collections that subtopics are able to inherit criteria from its parent, so all Issue instances are able to inherit criteria from the outer Newsletter instance.

Plone’s default feature of subtopics is used to create sections within the newsletter issue. For example one can create two sections - news and events - by creating subtopics which collect just this kind of content objects.

Once the content is generated one can edit the text as usual in Plone.

You can create your own templates to structure the selected content. Please refer to the provided “default” template to see how it works.

Step by step

  1. Add a EasyNewsletter instance, fill in the form and save it.
  2. If you want to write a simple manual mailing, you can add an Issue and fill it out with your text.
  3. Or if you want to use collections to collect you content first, then you can add an Issue, go to Criteria tab and add the criteria, which shall be applied to all of your Newsletters, e.g. “Items Type”.
  4. You can create more than one subcollection to build categories like news, events and pictures in your newsletter. Just add some collections to the newsletter itself and define your criteria for all of them. The issues will combine them into different part in your content area.
  5. Go to the view tab and call Aggregate body content from the action menu.
  6. You can also add subcollections and define criteria on Issue level.
  7. Go to Send tab and push Test Newsletter.
  8. If your Newsletter/Mailing is finished, you can activate the send button by clicking on Enable send button. Then you can click on Send newsletter to send the Newsletter to all subscribers or selected groups and users.

Images in HTML mails

  • All images with relative urls in src attribute, like the ones added by TinyMCE, are included and attached to the mail.
  • All images with absolute urls in src attribute are not attached but included in HTML with the original src url.

Elements for mails only

If you want some elements, let’s say a logo only in mails but not in the public view, you can put it inside a div tag with a class “mailonly”. All div elements with class “mailonly” are filtered out in the public view.

Filtering Users, Groups and Receivers

EasyNewsletter provide a flexible way to filter the Plone members, Plone groups and the recivers list. You can provide smal funtion in your add-on and register it as IReceiversMemberFilter, IReceiversGroupFilter or IReceiversPostSendingFilter. The filter get the list and can filter out some entries or even add some entries.

IReceiversMemberFilter filters

Interface: Products.EasyNewsletter.interfaces.IReceiversMemberFilter

The IReceiversMemberFilter filters can be used to filter the list of Plone members which a user can select in newsletters and issues.

class ReceiversMemberFilterNoPloneMember(object):
    """ filters all members out of newsletter receivers selection list,
        which are default plone members. This is usefull if you whant
        only membrane members but not the default plone user as receivers.
        receivers: [(id, {'email': 'info@example.com',...})]
    """

    def __init__(self, context):
        self.context = context

    def filter(self, receivers):
        portal = getSite()
        query = {}
        query['portal_type'] = ['Contact',]
        contacts = portal.membrane_tool.search(query)
        whitelist = [contact.getUserId for contact in contacts]
        receivers = [receiver for receiver in receivers
                if receiver[0] in whitelist]
        return receivers

This filter should be registered as follow:

<subscriber zcml:condition="installed my.package"
    for="Products.EasyNewsletter.interfaces.IEasyNewsletter"
    factory="my.package.newsletter.ReceiversMemberFilterNoPloneMember"
    provides="Products.EasyNewsletter.interfaces.IReceiversMemberFilter" />

IReceiversGroupFilter filters

Interface: Products.EasyNewsletter.interfaces.IReceiversGroupFilter

The IReceiversGroupFilter filters can be used to filter the list of Plone groups which a user can select in newsletters and issues.

class ReceiversGroupFilterInactiveOrganizations(object):
    """ Filter all inactive organizations, out of the group selection list.
        receivers: [(id, {'email': 'info@example.com',...})]
    """

    def __init__(self, context):
        self.context = context

    def filter(self, receivers):
        portal = getSite()
        query = {}
        query['portal_type'] = ['Organization']
        query['review_state'] = ['inactive', 'internal', 'pending', 'former_member']
        inactive_groups = portal.membrane_tool.search(query)
        blacklist = [black.getGroupId for black in inactive_groups]
        receivers = [receiver for receiver in receivers
                if receiver[0] not in blacklist]
        return receivers

This filter should be registered as follow:

<subscriber zcml:condition="installed my.package"
    for="Products.EasyNewsletter.interfaces.IEasyNewsletter"
    factory="my.package.newsletter.ReceiversGroupFilterInactiveOrganizations"
    provides="Products.EasyNewsletter.interfaces.IReceiversGroupFilter" />

IReceiversPostSendingFilter filters

Interface: Products.EasyNewsletter.interfaces.IReceiversMemberFilter

The IReceiversPostSendingFilter can be used to filter the list of reveivers before sending emails to all receivers.

class ReceiversPostSendingFilterNoNewsletter(object):
    """ Filter all contacts that has not set the receive_newsletter
    flag, out of receivers email list. But only if the Newsletter provide
    IReceiversMemberFilterNoNewsletter.
    receivers: [{'email': 'info@example.com',...}]
    """

    def __init__(self, context):
        self.context = context

    def filter(self, receivers):
        newsletter_object = self.context
        if IReceiversMemberFilterNoNewsletter.providedBy(newsletter_object):
            portal = getSite()
            query = {}
            query['portal_type'] = ['Contact']
            query['getReceive_newsletter'] = False
            no_enl_contacts = portal.membrane_tool.search(query)
            blacklist = [black.getUserId for black in no_enl_contacts]
            receivers = [receiver for receiver in receivers
                    if receiver['email'] not in blacklist]
        return receivers

This filter should be registered as follow:

<subscriber zcml:condition="installed my.package"
    for="Products.EasyNewsletter.interfaces.IEasyNewsletter"
    factory="my.package.newsletter.ReceiversPostSendingFilterNoNewsletter"
    provides="Products.EasyNewsletter.interfaces.IReceiversPostSendingFilter" />

Configuring external subscriber sources

An external subscriber sources provides (additional) subscriber to a newsletter instance.

You configure an external subscriber source as a Zope 3 utility providing ISubscriberSource (here’s an example where subscriptions are managed externally through MongoDB):

class NewsletterSource(object):

    implements(ISubscriberSource)

    def getSubscribers(self, newsletter):
        """ return all subscribers for the given newsletter
            from the MyInfo user database. Newsletter subscriptions
            are referenced inside MyInfo through UIDs.
        """

        uid = newsletter.UID()

        # find MyInfo subscribers
        myinfo = getUtility(IMyInfo)
        subscribers = list()
        for user in myinfo.accounts.find({'data.newsletters': uid, 'state': 'active'}):
            subscribers.append(dict(email=user['email'], fullname=user['username']))
        return subscribers

The utility must be registered using ZCML:

<utility zcml:condition="installed Products.EasyNewsletter"
    name="MyInfo subscribers"
    factory=".newsletter.NewsletterSource"
    />

Inside the Edit view of the instance under the External tab you should find MyInfo subscribers under the option External subscriber source.

Allowed placeholders

The following placeholder can be used in the header, body and footer of Issues:

  • [[SUBSCRIBER_SALUTATION]]
  • [[UNSUBSCRIBE]]

Documentation

For more documentation please visit: http://packages.python.org/Products.EasyNewsletter/

Source Code

In dec 2011 the source code repository was moved from svn-collective to github.

Authors

  • initial release: Kai Dieffenbach
  • Maik Derstappen
  • Andreas Jung
  • Philip Bauer
  • Timo Stollenwerk
  • Dinu Gherman

Contents:

Indices and tables