[support] Simplenews question

[Neil: esl-lounge.com]

Albert,

I faced the same issues as you and here is what I ended up doing with 
SimpleNews:

1. Create simple text newsletter that goes to everyone on the list 
containing just something like:

Hi $user,

Today's newsletter can be found here:

http://www.mysite.com/newsletters/27-sept-07

Regards
etc, etc

2. Members have to log in to view the node on which I created the actual 
newsletter itself.

3. Set filter to php on that page and use block snippets to present each 
member with unique content or else other blocks which would be the same for 
all members. Examples:

- last 10 blog entries (same for all)
- last 10 members from your state (unique)
- last 5 forum posts about your state (unique)
- most read forum topics this week (same for all)

and so on.

4. This means that each week, I only need to write opening paragraph 
(general site news, contests, etc) and the rest of the newsletter pretty 
much writes itself. Not only does it come out looking fresh each week, but 
fresh for each individual member. Depending on how much granularity you want 
to use, there's no reason why you can't be sending out 5000 newsletters with 
no two being identical.

Neil



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Albert Cuesta" <acuesta at gmail.com>
To: <support at drupal.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2007 11:39 AM
Subject: [support] Simplenews question


> Hi
>
> As far as I know, Simplenews is the only available module for managing
> newsletters. However, I find it way too... well, simple (!) when
> compared to the newsletter modules for other platforms, lacking such
> basic features as generating the newsletter content automatically,
> based, for instance, on the 10 most recent nodes, or the last post
> from some category, or the latest registered users, and so on.
>
> Are there any plugins for Simplenews that help creating the newsletter
> content? Or have I missed some, more advanced, alternative newsletter
> modules for Drupal?
>
> Thanks in advance for your comments
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Albert Cuesta
> http://www.CanalPDA.com
> -- 
> [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
>