Albert, It seems like the "enewsletter" module would be perfect. But it isn't done and the last commit was from November of last year. I've tried emailing the creator but didn't get any response from him. http://drupal.org/project/enewsletter I like Neils ideas, quite clever on the customizing. Here is something else I'm looking into: http://zookoda.com/ I've done some initial testing and it's good but needs some tweaking. They provide a tagging system to help create a template with exactly what you want. And the most important thing is that it didn't have any trouble bringing in data from Drupal generated RSS feeds. Once nice feature is that you can rearrange the order of the articles that were brought in via the feed, or arbitrarily delete any of them. Looks pretty nifty, and it's free! Report back, Shai http://content2zero.com On 9/29/07, Neil: esl-lounge.com <neil@esl-lounge.com> wrote:

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/ ]

-- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]

On 9/30/07, Cog Rusty <cog.rusty@gmail.com> wrote:

On 9/29/07, Albert Cuesta <acuesta@gmail.com> wrote:

...

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.

Besides Simplenews (which is what I consider a newsletter), if you want more direct user choices there are also:

http://drupal.org/project/notify http://drupal.org/project/subscription

Oops. Sorry, I meant http://drupal.org/project/subscriptions "subscription" looks dead.

...

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/ ]

I've not tried this, but you might look at expanding the newsletter node type with CCK fields for node reference etc., pulling in other nodes into the newsletter node being composed. Then you get the simplenews subscription management combined with the power of CCK. Again, I've not tried it and simplenews may need some modification to "see" the entire CCK-expanded node elements, but that might be the easiest way to get there. Not sure. Laura On Sep 30, 2007, at 1:24 PM, Albert Cuesta wrote:

Thanks for your replies.

Neil, your suggestion about sending just the URL of a hosted 'newsletter' is extremely clever. However, I'm not sure how it would work with sponsored newsletters, that one can read offline and would include the ad banners.

Shai, you're right: the eNewsletter module looks like the one I need. Please share with us any response from the developers. Regarding Zookoda, I'm actually a subscriber of several newsletters hosted there and it looks good. However, I'm not very comfortable with having to manage two separate subscribers lists.

Cog, I am aware of the subscription / subscriptions modules, which I'm using in other sites. However, they are not exactly newsletter systems.

Kind regards

---------------------------------------------------------------------- Albert Cuesta http://www.canalpda.com -- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]

BTW, look at Insert Views module for another way of getting dynamic content into nodes, which could help if you do go down my route of having hosted newsletters. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Albert Cuesta" <acuesta@gmail.com> To: <support@drupal.org> Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2007 9:24 PM Subject: Re: [support] Simplenews question

Thanks for your replies.

Neil, your suggestion about sending just the URL of a hosted 'newsletter' is extremely clever. However, I'm not sure how it would work with sponsored newsletters, that one can read offline and would include the ad banners.

Shai, you're right: the eNewsletter module looks like the one I need. Please share with us any response from the developers. Regarding Zookoda, I'm actually a subscriber of several newsletters hosted there and it looks good. However, I'm not very comfortable with having to manage two separate subscribers lists.

Cog, I am aware of the subscription / subscriptions modules, which I'm using in other sites. However, they are not exactly newsletter systems.

Kind regards

---------------------------------------------------------------------- Albert Cuesta http://www.canalpda.com -- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]