By dtabach on

Hello,

For a band's site, the editors (the band's members) want to communicate the scheduled shows to their fans. This is usually done a few days before the event.

I've created a CCK content called 'Show', with a date field provided by Date module, among others. This gives me nice Calendar Views of next shows. I did not use the Event module because I only need a date for the start of the event, not its end.

Now I want every node of the type 'Show' is emailed to an emailing list of subscribers (not necessarily authenticated users).

Besides the 'Show' type, the band's members will occasionally email other nodes, such as Stories. But they do not want to send every new node of other types.

After a lot of searching, I could not find modules or snippets to get this functionality.

The Simple News module is the closest I could get. I suppose I could edit the Newsletter content type, trasnforimng it in a 'Show' type, adding the date field I need, and then send it by email. But, AFAIK, I cannot have more than one node type (Newsletter) that sends itself by email.

The Notify module does not allow filtering by content type, and requires the subscriber to be an authenticated user. I could force new fans to register to the site, but there is already hundreds of subscribers in a Yahoo!Groups mailing list, and it would be insane to create new accounts for everyone.

The Send module is great, because I can choose on the fly what node will be sent and, with the Mimemail module, I can send nice looking HTML mails. But I can only send the node to one address, not a list...

So I feel I'm close to an ideal solution, but didn't get there yet...

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Comments

theorichel’s picture

theorichel commented

As I am having exactly the same problem, may I inquire whether and how you solved it?

Thx

Theo Richel

dtabach’s picture

dtabach commented

I didn't arrive at a complete solution yet., but I'm glad you asked. Maybe we could work out a solution together.

I used SimpleNews module and added some cck fields to the simplenews content type (date of event, place of event), then this became my 'Show' content type.

The problem is that SimpleNews does not applies the node-simplenews.tpl.php template to the emails being sent. The workaround was to use Contemplate module, then 'affect body output' of the message (http://drupal.org/node/180831). But this is not ideal, because I don't have control over other elements of the message, such as the Title.

Tried SimpleNews Template module, to no avail. The style that should be applied to the Newsletter is not working (http://drupal.org/node/156989). The module does add a header and a footer to the message, but these elements also show when the node is seen on the site, which is, to say the least, redundant (http://drupal.org/node/141635). SimpleNews adds a footer, which does not appear on the node, as it should be, but this footer is non-editable and very restricted (simply 'click here to unsubscribe'). If I used the editable footer provided by SimpleNews Template, it would appear also in the node, and I would end up with a message with two footers (http://drupal.org/node/139305)!

So the solution was to abandon SimpleNews Template and hack SimpleNews module, adding my custom HTML/CSS for header, footer and Title. The hack is also necessary to translate text strings (could not find them in Localization>Manage strings), and to customize the subscription/unsubscription confirmation e-mail.

Now I have the newsletter working the way I need, but the other part of the problem - occasionally sending other node types to the mailing list – remains unsolved. Unfortunately, SimpleNews works only for one content type at a time (http://drupal.org/node/167057).

The Email Newsletter module (http://drupal.org/project/enewsletter) seems to be a great solution for all these needs, but the latest (and only) release of eNewsletter, as well as all the 7 other required modules, was made in November/2006, for drupal 4.6...

Durval Tabach

Durval Tabach