Email newsletter module for Plone released
Jan 25th, 2004 by Jon Stahl
CMFNewsletter 1.0 was released a couple of days ago. It’s an email newsletter module for Plone.
CMFNewsletter enables you to create one or more newsletters for your site. Each newsletter gathers content using topic-based criteria. Subscription can be restricted to members only, made available to anonymous or another custom set of members, via workflow guards. Subscription is done via the web, and by email if you set up PortalTransport and an email address for your newsletter. The newsletter is a page template, which you can customize. You can also invoke a pre-processing script before the newsletter is generated, which is useful for adding additional email header data or manipulating the content gathered. Newsletters are kept by default in the portal_newsletters tool, because normally newsletters should not be viewed in the site - only by receiving through email. There is no archiving option to view older newsletters. You can add and manage newsletters through the control panel. It is possible to create newsletters outside of the tool, by checking the Implicitly Addable property of the Newsletter content type in portal_types.
This is probably not the ultimate email newsletter tool, but it might well be one that the nonprofit community could invest in and extend, if it thinks that Plone is a “worthy” CMS platform. (Which I am strongly starting to suspect that it is.)
I’m curious to find out why Dogwood Initiative did not go with Plone? Last I talked with you folks at ONE/NW, Plone was the CMS du jour.
I’ve been hosting the PushToTest Web site on Zope for a couple of years. I am in the process of building a new site based on Plone. So far it’s been a great experience. -Frank