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@gmail.com To: support@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/ ]