Simplenews in combination with OG

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You could maybe write a glue module with a hook_menu_alter that puts in a different access callback to the menu items, and in that check which group the newsletter belongs to?

You'r all invited to supply a patch with a proper integration of simplenews with OG.

I might get started working on a patch for this... this would be an absolute killer feature, imo.

@geerlingguy: Please let me know if I can assist with pointing you to parts of the module or give architectural advise. I will surely review the patch.

@held69: How can you contribute?

You can do more than you think: write (minimum) specifications, design user interfaces, write documentation

My minimum specs so far (what I need for my project, at least):

- OG Group administrator can add as many newsletters as he/she wants (per group)
- Group administrator (or those with permission) may create and send newsletters for the group
- Option to allow anyone, or simply those in the current group, to subscribe to newsletters inside groups individually
- Universal newsletters able to be managed/created by only those with the proper permission (site-wide news)
- Newsletter issue posts only within the group for which it is written

Nice things to have, but not yet necessary:

- Per-group templates (a la Simplenews Template module)
- Speed, speed and more speed, and possibly more cron job optimization (scheduling of newsletter sending, perhaps integrated with Scheduler module and/or Date module).

Right now I'm working on more detailed specs, and will be reading up on OG programming/structure.

Is Simplenews Subscription Manager (#461436: Bring over functionality of Simplenews Subscription Manager) a thing to use / combine with Simplenews for OG?

Hi,

Well, while some code could be shared, using OG for dedicated newsletters is not enough if you just want to let people subscribe with the email only, and not having to create a user.

subscribe.

subscribe

Code contributions are welcome. But OG integration is not on my priority list.

Sorry - I've had to put this project on hold a bit; I still plan on working on the integration at some point...

Also requested in #148837: Integration with Organic Groups

For this, we'd need possibly #536620: Subscriber API: separate subscribers from newsletter management and allow other modules to define subscribers if the idea is that group members automatically get the newsletter.
We might also need #453174: User Role Mailing List Sign Up Availablility as an API of some sort, so the ability to manually subscribe is not just based on roles.

A subscribers API sounds like it would be a very good step forward; I can envision Simplenews being able to replace Constant Contact or Aweber in many organizations (that have the manpower to deal with spam issues and email) if these kinds of things become reality. I can think of many ways in which this would be beneficial...

So what is the status for this? would love to see this working!

No progress. I love to see code coming for this, but someone need to write it. Don't wait for others to scratch your itch, scratch your own. I know ... it is not a nice answer, but that's the way it works.

I'm still hoping to take a crack at this at some point, but other projects have taken a lot of my time lately :(

That's just the way of things...

If there is no code coming out, I would be willing to try to get to it sometime and see were I can help... at this point I have yet to even install Simplenews, just doing some planning on my own... Will take a look this weekend, but this would be my first attempt at creating and submitting a patch so I would love some direction or advice. Maybe things to keep in mind while I try to find a solution.

Changing the version, as no new features will be added to 6.x-1.x.

We won't add this in 6.x-2.x. This is a new usecase and i don't want to add such new features now. Moving to 7.

So, just because I'm not too familiar with how module development works... would that mean adding it to D7 and then looking at backporting it to D6?

Please have a look at our roadmap announcement:
#964864: Roadmap of Simplenews 6.x-2.0 / 7.x

Strategies and feature consideration rules are up to the maintainer.
Since D7 is very near i decided to complete 6.x-2.x in a non-intrusive way and complete features that make sense.
Everything that need major adoptions will be dropped. Also seamless migration to D7 is very important.

As soon as we start pushing D7 (since 6.x-2.x has a stable release), i won't accept any new feature for 6.x-2.x. So don't expect any backport ever.
To work on both releases in parallel we have simply too few resources.

Understood,

I simply asked because I am still interested in helping out with this, would want to not be spending time trying to help on a patch you won't support :-)

A backport patch would always be accepted, of course - or maybe an addon module. However, I'm completely understanding of holding off until D7 - Organic Groups in D7 is going to be much more pluggable anyways.

Maybe one of the possible approachs for this issue is similar to OG Forum behaviour:

• automatically create a newsletter when creating a group
• automatically subscribe every member of the group to the newsletter

Finer configuration could come after that. What do you think ?

Note that for massive OG amounts this causes the well known architectural issue:
#699566: Too many terms cause the build block page not load.

Perhaps this little module will help you along... It allows you to auto-populate a newsletter with emailadresses from a view. Small tutorial to get it working
1) extract files to sites/all/modules/simplenews_views_subscriptions/ and enable module
2) create view with 1 (and only 1) field containing an emailaddress as plain text, setup filters as you like ;)
3) goto admin/content/simplenews/types, click edit on any newsletter you wish to autifill with the view
4) at the bottom of the page, select your view (Views synchronization)

This module was written for the 1.x branch of Simplenews and might be very buggy for you... it was written very quickly to accomplish this functionality for 1 particular use-case :)

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Subscribing

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Subscribed, a very needed feature in my opinion.

Aren't you looking for something like OG Mailing List ?

OG Mailing List doesn't have a D7 version.

I've started making the og_simplenews module for the current project I'm working on.
The following specs are achieved:

- OG Group administrator can add as many newsletters as he/she wants (per group)
- Group administrator (or those with permission) may create and send newsletters for the group
- Option to allow anyone, or simply those in the current group, to subscribe to newsletters inside groups individually
- Universal newsletters able to be managed/created by only those with the proper permission (site-wide news)
- Newsletter issue posts only within the group for which it is written

The module is not yet ready to drop here, because I have to change some hard coded things (for my project) into admin pages. If you realy nead the module fast, you can always contact me: brunogoossens at gmail dot com.

The way the module works.
Simplenews works with categories and OG with groups.
To solve this problem, I've linked each group to a category.
Permissions within OG are added so you are able to change permissions for every group to send/create/admin newsletters. Admin pages only show newsletters you have the permission to admin (over all the groups).

Into simplenews admin pages you mean?

Feel free to post a patch whenever you feel ready and I'll try to give you a review.

Remember that it doesn't need to be finished for a first patch, I'm most likely going to be nitpicking your patch apart anyway, I tend to do that :)

What is the status for Simplenews in combination with OG?

Is this the go-to-solution right now?

http://drupal.org/project/og
http://drupal.org/project/notifications
http://drupal.org/project/messaging
http://drupal.org/project/mailcomment
http://drupal.org/project/mailhandler

or maybe or http://drupal.org/project/og_mailinglist

I'm starting to feel that a combination of Organic Groups and some mailing solution would be the simplest thing for many users to understand and maintain. In simplenews you first have to create a newsletter and then one have to remember to send it (here you last half of the non-technical people already). And it's hard to add people to groups.

Sub

Any news on that? Would be a great feature!

+1

Does anyone think this is still needed or are other kinds of solutions better?

Just want to point out that the module attachment #34 is for D6 version and this thread is set for 7.x

Hello everybody,

I started writing a module for OG 7.x-2.x and Simplenews 7.x-1.x. See https://www.drupal.org/sandbox/herve001/2795207
Any help/feedback is welcome.

Any success in using #49 or #34?

Thanks

Hello everyone,

I recently did a massive update on my sandbox here: https://www.drupal.org/sandbox/herve001/2795207
It contains pretty much everything I had in mind and it fully integrates OG with Simplenews.
I'd be interested to get some reviews and I'm willing to promote and maintain it to a full project, if anyone is interested.
If so I might even start a D8 version.

Thank you,
Hervé

@sk213: I'm using my sandbox for a few months on a production website.

Great Effort herved ! much appreciated.

I think you can release it as a module so that we can test it in our environment instead of keeping it in sandbox unless you feel it is not to be used safely in DEV or TEST ENV.

Thanks
SK2013

It's great to see progress with integrations, thank you for pushing things forward.

7.x-1.x is pretty much frozen and we don't want to add weight to the maintenance.
As long as you want to release something 7.x, it would be a separate project.

For 8.x i would need to do an assessment. In fact, simplenews didn't progress since months in 8.x, because of limited relevancy for us.
As the group area is also fragmented in 8.x (there are multiple related modules), i tend for a first vote to have that integration separated and keep Simplenews itself slim and focussed to its core job. Maintenance energy is limited and needs to be well managed.

Thank you,

I promoted my sandbox to a full project: https://www.drupal.org/project/simplenews_og

@sk2013: The code is pretty much complete to me at this point but any review is truly appreciated.

@miro_dietiker: Personally I vote for a separate module as well.
Fragmented? You mean there are other (possibly better?) alternatives for D8?
To give you some background for my current project I thought about the Message stack which is more recent. However a strong requirement was that anonymous users would be able to subscribe. That was not possible without a huge effort with the message stack. See https://github.com/Gizra/message_subscribe/issues/104

Yeah... Simplenews contains subscriber management and newsletter management. I thought multiple times about separating the subscriber management from Simplenews... But for different types of channels, you need different type of content. Also we are more for manually curated content as newsletters and less automated subscriptions (for example search agents / saved search or daily / weekly digests).

So reuse and avoiding duplication was not possible as the complexity would have grown into multiple dimension, destroying the simplicity of the Simplenews code and use case.

We could extend the subscribers to support other sources. It's a common scenario to import / sync subscribers with third party systems. We could also create subscriber wrappers to other delivery channels.

Fragmented:
There is the group module in D8:
https://www.drupal.org/project/group
For some projects, group building also is related to subdomains, where the Domain Access module would fit:
https://www.drupal.org/project/domain

Our pain point is currently much more a missing Drupal UI to manage trigger mails, allowing you to create any amount of trigger mails for any type of action with conditions, may be variants of the mails for specific cases, sure with tokens, and possibly scheduling... Bringing in all this context to a third party system turned out to be hard with deep integration. It's frustrating that this requirement can not really be covered with any of the current tools.