[DUG-TO] News / MLM / Send modules

[Eric Mercer]

Ouch. It looks like I'd better keep my postings plain-text to keep the mail-list software happy.
Eric

At 04:47 PM 2/10/09, Eric Mercer wrote:
>For Drupal 6 users, a great solution is Simplenews plus the Insert View module ( http://drupal.org/project/insert_view). I've made a View with argument(s) that lets me ask for "all repeating events in May '09" for instance, and I insert it into a Simplenews Newsletter node using Insert View. Another place in that Newsletter is an insertion for all one-time events for the given month, for instance, as well as a custom header for that month. My events are created with the Date module (http://drupal.org/project/date), and I just set the newsletter system up up last week. The not-yet-open-to-the-public site is at ( http://centre.soitoronto.org/terms/newsletter/monthly-reminder).
>
>My approach is to (soon) create an entire year's worth of monthly newsletters in advance, each customized with the proper Insert Views arguments, and when that newsletter's distribution time comes I'll send it out with the current moment's schedule created dynamically. Letting people access the future, tentative newsletters as a version of a calendar is attractive to me. (The taxonomy system automatically uses the vocabulary that Simplenews creates, so it creates a listing of newsletters of a particular class. The page I pointed you to above uses my generic "taxonomy/term/%" header, but I might make a custom View for it sometime.) I will probably freeze newsletters at send time by manually copying the HTML code from that day's distribution event and pasting it over my dynamic version, so past newsletters will show what was actually sent out even after future updates to the event nodes. 
>
>If you wanted to be slick, you could probably embed PHP code to make a single fancy newsletter generator that would create "the coming month's" newsletter, and send it out automatically using Simplenews Scheduler (http://drupal.org/project/simplenews_scheduler), if it wasn't Drupal 5 only (http://drupal.org/node/313979).
>
>Eric