HTML Newsletter: Introduction
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The HTML Newsletter is an add-on module for PHP-Nuke 6.5 - 7.6 which sends a newsletter email in HTML format. The base PHP-Nuke newsletters module was just too basic and did not have many features that are found in non-Nuke newsletter tools.
History
HTML Newsletter version 1.0 was originally conceived by mangaman from NukeWorks. He had expanded upon the original core nuke code to include a really easy templating system, which allowed the PHP-Nuke admin/author to write newsletters using all the power and formatting capability of HTML.
I ran across the NukeWorks module in November, 2004, while looking for a way to write my own personal family site newsletters, and to get them to look the way I wanted them. There were a few minor bugs that I fixed and made a few minor enhancements and decided to suggest the same to managaman for possible inclusion in a new release. Mangaman had run into some bad times and was just unable to support further development, so he released version 1.1 from NukeWorks from the distribution that I gave him.
Although I found the HTML Newsletter tool to be quite useful, I needed it to do more. I embarked on adding NSN Groups support, newsletter categories, viewing permissions, and more. Version 1.2 was also released from NukeWorks, but eventually I decided that I needed to support the community from Montego Scripts in order to ensure that I could respond quickly to site issues and forum posts.
Features
As of this writing, the HTML Newsletter has these features:
- Create and send HTML Newsletters.
- Uses a simple templating system for easily creating your own look for the newsletter.
- Can choose to also use NO template.
- Can include links to latest chosen number of news articles, downloads, web links, forum posts, and reviews in a Newsletter Contents "block".
- For long newsletters, can also add links in the Newsletter Contents "block" using anchors in the HTML you provide.
- Newsletters can be categorized for nicer organization within the provided block and module.
- Comes with built-in integration to nukeWYSIWYG (FCKEditor and possibly other future such editors).
- Newsletter view permissions are set based on who it is sent to.
- Preview newsletters before you send them.
- Send test newsletter email to the website administrator.
- Send tested newsletters to the intended recipients.
- Can create a newsletter that ALL visitors can see.
- If using NSN Groups, can send to one or more NSN Groups.
- If using NSN GR Downloads, can enable by making a small configuration change of the module download name property (see pop-up help for how to do this).
- Also comes with a backend RSS/XML feed for anonymous newsletters.
- Archive System so users can view previously sent newsletters
- A module and block to display most recent and archived newsletters.
- Can configure to also show newsletters under categories.
- Newsletters can now only be viewed by those users with the permissions to do so.
- Can configure to show one or more of the following: view "hits", sender, and/or date sent.
- Special administrative features:
- Comprehensive installation and upgrade tool.
- All features configurable via module administration tool.
- Can create/modify/delete newsletter categories.
- Can move newsletters around to different categories.
- Can remove newsletters from the system.
- Can set overall block limit count (i.e., number of newsletters to show) as well as the number of newsletters to show within each category within the block.
- Can set level of error display.
- Additional features:
- All screens translatable, including installer, using the language files.
- All module, block and administrative functions produce 100% W3C Strict compliant output (the only exception being the newsletter templates themselves)
Additional Details
See additional details in the Newsletter on-line Change Log file (either here or within the download package).
NOTE: REQUIRES MINIMUM 2.9 PATCHSET FROM http://www.nukeresources.com if using standard PHP-Nuke (does not apply to RavenNuke(tm))!
For on-going development status, check out the Newsletter on-line road-map
