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A new extension, "Email Newsletter Manager" is now available for download. Comments and feedback can be left here but if you discover any issues, please post it on the issue tracker.

Symphony is the best CMS for sending email. Finally.

Right in time before Christmas, myself and @michael-e proudly present the Email Newsletter Manager - the simplest way to send Email Newsletters directly from the Symphony backend.

This extension is the successor of the Email Newsletters extension, which has always been a biest and can now finally be considered a deprectated biest.

We hope that the Email Newsletter Manager will enable any Symphony developer to implement email newsletter functionality in his websites. The extension is built upon (and requires) the Email Template Manager extension (and Symphony's Core Email API).

Today's release is considered beta. If you find bugs, please post them on GitHub. Unfortunately one feature is missing completely, but we plan to have it in the 1.0 release: Datasource chaining for recipient groups. All the other features are supposed to work.

Available now. Have fun!

Thanks Guys. I know how much time you have put into this and can't wait to get stuck in.

Can’t wait to try this … unfortunately it will next year most likely … thanks so much!

Thanks for the extension. Just one question:

Does it still depends on shell_exec() function? Readme states that CLI is dropped, but mentions "some smart php background processes", so I got confused here.

Sorry, the README is wrong then. We tried to build a background process as stable as the PHP CLI variant, but to no avail. So this extension relies on the CLI as well.

Hey there, I'm giving this a go for one of my 2.2.5 symphonies... All seems nice but when I try to create a recipient group I get the attached error.

any ideas?

Attachments:
Screen shot 2011-12-22 at 12.31.38 AM.jpg

Somehow got it to work (even switched client's hosting plan to allow for shell commands), but got stuck anyway.

My simple setup: Newsletters section (textfield:bodycontent + newsletter manager (to send that exact content)). Each newsletter issue is added as a classic entry via "Create new".

Problem: Can't find how to properly filter email content DS (returns "bodycontent" textfield) which is linked to email template. Param pool is missing alltogether for e-mail templates, so no classic techniques can be used as it seems. How do I get that ID of the entry in which "Send" was pressed?

Totally stuck there. Any hints, please?

NB: For the sake of my two cents, I think that old way of having symphony pages as e-mail templates was much more better/flexible and straight forward. A simple example could be the classic html e-mail fallback: "If you cannot read this garbage, click here" which directs that user to that exact page address. Now it's gone or must be created separately (as a symphony page).

It is not a rant, please do not misinterpret.

In the README there is a link to a PDF file which contains the parameters to use. (The README will be improved when we release 1.0).

I don't really agree that pages were the better approach. It took much longer to create something that works. The ETM allows to create templates very quickly and use them via event filters!

I edited above post to better illustrate my thoughts. Thanks for the PDF, will examine and maybe change my mind :)

Merry x-mas!

A simple example could be the classic html e-mail fallback: "If you cannot read this garbage, click here" which directs that user to that exact page address.

Ah, interesting thought! In this case you are right, you will have to create a dedicated Symphony page for the "online version". But you might use the same XSLT utility for the email template and the Symphony page. (When I used the page-based approach with the deprecated Email Newsletters extension, I also had two different pages for email and web version, most of the time...)

I will very seriously use ETF/ETM in my current (big) project, which might help to find missing functionality or bugs. (Huib and I already talked about some things being hard to debug, for example.)

BTW: Apart from ETM's event filters, another big advantage I see is that both the ETM and the ENM have an API which eases usage in custom events.

I hope that we can improve the documentation over time. Any feedback is very welcome.

Merry x-mas!

Good hint on the utility.. it makes sense after studying this pdf and having those essential (hidden) params at hand.

Will test tomorrow and hopefully do not run into new bugs. I added some already to the issue tracker ;)

I am afraid that @creativedutchmen forgot to switch off the tracker on the Symphony website.

I will copy your bugs to GitHub. Please use the GitHub tracker!

@Komb: I posted your bugs on the GitHub tracker and already fixed 2 out of 3. Please pull the current code (master branch).

@ChriZ: Since your issue does not look like an ENM issue (but seems to be related to the Email Template Manager — ETM), can you please post your issue and/or findings in the ETM thread? (If you have not solved it already, can you give more information about the recipient group, especially the "Name XSLT"?)

I am afraid that there is one serious bug with the ETM at the moment. So if you don't manage to filter your datasources, don't despair — it might not be your fault. :-)

Scratch that. My bad. I did not notice that I need to filter using the Email Newsletter Manager field!

:-)

Attachments:
Bildschirmfoto 2011-12-23 um 14.45.50.png

Improved The Big Picture. :-)

Oh yes, I should have mentioned that;)

This is also the reason I switched the naming from $enm-entry-id to $enm-newsletter-id.

After the weekend I will have some time to take a look at the issues. I had indeed confirmed the $root and $workspace bugs. These are a flaw of the ENM, not of the ETM. The ENM does not use an apache process, so the documentroot variables do not make sense to it. I will have to pass them to the process (just like I did for the domain). Just forgot about it.

Thanks for giving it a go! I am pretty sure that once you figure it out it'll all make sense!

Got it all (filtering, etc) to work, no more problems so far.

Here comes a small wish list for your consideration.

1) When email issue is sent, ENM field (in entry listing and publish page) shows only "completed" and some count statistics. I think it would be better if info about which sender, mailing list and template was used remains visible in both places (in some textual manner, not dropdowns of course). Much better for review/resend purposes.

2) Email preview feature. I believe it is in the works.

3) Simple integrated solution (generated url + event?) to unsubscribe. For lazy people, like me :)

Thanks.

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Symphony • Open Source XSLT CMS

Server Requirements

  • PHP 5.3-5.6 or 7.0-7.3
  • PHP's LibXML module, with the XSLT extension enabled (--with-xsl)
  • MySQL 5.5 or above
  • An Apache or Litespeed webserver
  • Apache's mod_rewrite module or equivalent

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