Help: xNewsletter Back to the Administration of xNewsletter

Description

Newsletter module for xoops

Short description of basic functions:
- Usage of one or more e-mail-accounts
- Admin of one or more newsletter possible
- Subscription procedure optionally use confirmation system (double-opt-in)
- Detailed handling of permissions for subscription procedures
- Newsletter are based on templates
- Detailed handling of permissions for groups and newsletter (subscribe, write, send)
- Send: send test mail, resend to all subscribers or only to subscribers, where sending failed
- Sending newsletters to unlimited number of recipients or in packages with certain number of recipients by using cronjob
- Bounced email handler for handling Bounced emails in case of invalid e-mail-addresses
- Optionally synchronisation with mailing lists (e.g. majordomo)
- Maintenance function included
- Creating protocol for the important steps

Install/uninstall

No special measures necessary, follow the standard installation process - extract the /xnewsletter folder into the ../modules directory. Install the module through Admin -> Modules. If you need detailed instructions on how to install a module, please see the XOOPS Operations Manual.

Tutorial

Basic information

The module is based on PHPMailer and PHPMailer-BMH

(Un) subscriptions to newsletters

You can define for each newsletter and for each group, whether for (un) subscription or change a confirmation email with activation key is necessary or not (use double-option).


Accounts

You can use one or more email-account; sending with php mail, php sendmail, smtp is possible.
There is a feature for testing pop3 and imap accounts.

Pay attention: functions like testing account, sending emails, start Bounced email handler,... work not with local server (you get white page without any error).


Newsletter categories

You can handle one or more newsletter categories.
It is possible to set permissions "read", "create", "admin" and "list subscribers" for each newsletter cat.


Create a newsletter

The newsletter can be created with each text editor which is installed in current xoops core (e.g. TinyMCE).
For each newsletter you can use different templates (see also 'Newsletter templates').
You can define one or more newsletter categories for your newsletter.
You can add 5 files maximum as attachment to each newsletter.

Optionally you can also copy an older newsletter and edit or send it as a new one.

The type of text editor, allows mime-types and size of mail attachments can be set in module preferences.


Newsletter templates

The newsletters are template based.
The templates are stored as files in language/{yourlanguage}/templates or stored in database.
To create a new template you can:

  1. make a new template html-file in in language/{yourlanguage}/templates folder and to put in the smarty-vars;
  2. from admin side create a new template item and to put in the smarty-vars.

This module uses the Xoops Smarty template engine to render the email letter.

Available smarty-vars are: