emencia.django.newsletter 0.2

A Django app for sending newsletter by email to a contact list.

Features

More than a long speech, here the list of the main features :

• Coupling capacities with another django model.
• Variables can be used in the newsletter's templates.
• Mailing list managements (merging, importing...).
• Import/Export of the contact in VCard 3.0.
• Configurable SMTP servers with flow limit management.
• Working groups.
• Can send newsletter previews.
• Subscriptions and unsubscriptions to mailing list.
• Attachments in newsletters.
• Unique urls for an user.
• Tracking statistics.

Architecture

At the level of the application architecture, we can see 2 originalities who need to be explained.

$ python manage.py send_newsletter

Installation

You could retrieve the last sources from http://github.com/Fantomas42/emencia-django-newsletter and running the installation script

$ python setup.py install

or use pip

$ pip install -e git://github.com/Fantomas42/emencia-django-newsletter.git#egg=emencia.django.newsletter

For the latest stable version use easy_install

$ easy_install emencia.django.newsletter

DBMS considerations

It's not recommended to use SQLite for production use. Because is limited to 999 variables into a SQL query, you can not create a Mailing List greater than this limitations in the Django's admin modules. Prefer MySQL ou PgSQL.

HOWTO use TinyMCE for editing the newsletters

It can be usefull for the end user to have a WYSIWYG editor for the creation of the newsletter. The choice of the WYSIWYG editor is free and the described method can be applied for anything, but we will focus on TinyMCE because he has many features and a usefull plugin for loading templates within it.

First of all install the django-tinymce application into your project.

Now you will write a module called admin.py into the root directory of your project. This module will override the NewsletterAdmin class provided by emencia.django.newsletter with the TinyMCE editor and register the overrided class into the admin site.

from django import forms from django.contrib import admin

from tinymce.widgets import TinyMCE from emencia.django.newsletter.models import Newsletter from emencia.django.newsletter.admin import NewsletterAdmin

class NewsletterTinyMCEForm(forms.ModelForm): content = forms.CharField(widget=TinyMCE(attrs={'cols': 150, 'rows': 80}))

class Meta: model = Newsletter

class NewsletterTinyMCEAdmin(NewsletterAdmin): form = NewsletterTinyMCEForm

admin.site.unregister(Newsletter) admin.site.register(Newsletter, NewsletterTinyMCEAdmin)

The last step is to make a call to your module to load the code. A good solution is to import the admin.py module in the urls.py file of your project.

import yourproject.admin

Enjoy !

HOWTO couple your profile application with emencia.django.newsletter

If you wan to quickly import your contacts into a mailing list for example, you can write an admin's action for your model.

We suppose that we have the fields email, first_name and last_name in a models name Profile.

In his AdminModel definition add this method and register it into the actions property.

class ProfileAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):

def make_mailing_list(self, request, queryset): from emencia.django.newsletter.models import Contact from emencia.django.newsletter.models import MailingList

subscribers = [] for profile in queryset: contact, created = Contact.objects.get_or_create(email=profile.mail, defaults={'first_name': profile.first_name, 'last_name': profile.last_name, 'content_object': profile}) subscribers.append(contact) new_mailing = MailingList(name='New mailing list', description='New mailing list created from admin/profile') new_mailing.save() new_mailing.subscribers.add(*subscribers) new_mailing.save() self.message_user(request, '%s succesfully created.' % new_mailing) make_mailing_list.short_description = 'Create a mailing list'

actions = ['make_mailing_list',]

This action will create or retrieve all the Contact instances needed for the mailing list creation.

After this you can send a newsletter to this mailing list.

Development

A Buildout script is provided to properly initialize the project for anybody who wants to contribute.

First of all, please use VirtualEnv to protect your system.

Follow these steps to start the development :

$ git clone git://github.com/Fantomas42/emencia-django-newsletter.git
$ virtualenv --no-site-packages emencia-django-newsletter
$ cd emencia-django-newsletter
$ source ./bin/activate
$ python bootstrap.py
$ ./bin/buildout

The buildout script will resolve all the dependancies needed to develop the application.

Once these operations are done, you are ready to develop on the project.

Run this command to launch the tests.

$ ./bin/test

Pretty easy no ?

Database Representation

Changelog