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I'm trying to implement a newsletter for my users to subscribe to and I'm noticing that there are a lot of different newsletter modules out there. I'm was looking for one that will easily allow me to:

  1. Send weekly newsletters with a summary of the top 5-10 posts from that week.
  2. Allow me to have multiple newsletters for the different "Categories" of content on my site (I have a taxonomy term "Categories" which I would like my users to be able to pick which "Categories" they'd like to subscribe to).
  3. Allow me to customize the look of the news letter.

I've already tried simplenews but can't seem to get it to do what I want. I feel that this may be beyond what it can do.

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    What does Simplenews not do for you?
    – Malks
    Commented Jan 7, 2012 at 20:34
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    I can't put my content types into the article. I have several "categories" and I would like to have a weekly newsletter for each category which holds a summary of all the articles posted to that category in a given week.
    – Mike
    Commented Jan 7, 2012 at 21:47

7 Answers 7

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Try the Newsletter module. The features portrayed in the project page:

  • Multiple newsletters lists configurable on existing terms.
  • Plain text or HTML out of the box.
  • Multiple schedules Each newsletter can have more than one schedule, e.g. Daily, Monthly, Weekly, manually or even custom, eg after 10 new posts for this term.
  • Centralized administration and configuration on a single page.
  • Users can customize the terms in the list they subscribe to.
  • Custom template per list.
  • Statistics (CTR and Open-Rate).

It allows using HTML for the email (uses regular Drupal filters).

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  • Only problem is I am unable to get it to have SINGE-click subscribes!
    – rockstardev
    Commented Sep 22, 2015 at 8:04
  • @coderama what do you mean by that?
    – Capi Etheriel
    Commented Sep 24, 2015 at 22:08
  • *single-click subscribes. If you add the subscribe block to a page, and you then click subscribe, it first takes you to a page where you must select the newsletter. there is no inherent way I have found without building a module that let's you click subscribe, and then get a thank you page. That is why I went with simplenews.
    – rockstardev
    Commented Sep 27, 2015 at 17:26
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Why don't you try MailChimp? Here is the Drupal MailChimp module.

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I've had good luck with the Messaging & Notifications module. It will send out an email for a given "event" be that a new node, an updated node, etc. You can modify the settings so that the default is a digest like you are seeking, but the users can choose the frequency at which they'd like to be notified per taxonomy-term.

So for example, you default it to send once a week, but they want to receive notifications of new content daily, they can choose to do so but are not forced into it. Conversely, if they choose to receive a monthly digest instead, they can do that as well.

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5

Maybe if you hear what we did for a government agency, you may get an idea.

We used a Simplenews effectively and modified it with the aid of five modules.

They needed to include four content types from several different sections of the website out in a bi-monthly newsletter

They also wanted to reorganize them into two distinct newsletters that uses could subscribe to.

The four content types were publications, funding opportunities podcast and the site blog.

The blog had five distinct categories (taxonomy terms), for the sake of this discussion we will call them category one through category five.

For the form:

In order to reference nodes, you need the node reference field which is part of CCK in Drupal 6

(For Drupal 7 use References - http://drupal.org/project/references)

We created a newsletter content type that had eight different node reference fields.

The first node reference field was set to only reference the publication content type. The second was set for funding opportunities content type and the third was set for podcast content type

The last five were set for the blog content type, but I needed to narrow down the selection of each of the fields so that one only showed posts tagged with category one, another showed posts tagged with only category two and so on.

To do this, we used the Node Reference views module. http://drupal.org/project/nodereference_views (Reference views for Drupal 7 - http://drupal.org/project/reference_views)

Node Reference views lets you create a specific view and then you can use that view to filter out the node reference options for a specific node reference field.

For Display:

In order to control the way the output of the different node reference fields looked, we used the Viewfeild module - http://drupal.org/project/viewfield. Once installed, you can choose viewfeild from the display options and then customize the view the way you want.

To control the rest of the newsletter, we used simplenews template - http://drupal.org/project/simplenews_template . It lets you add multiple newsletters with customizatible headers and footers, and the ability for users to pick between them.

To futher customize the display of each newsletter, we used Contemplate - http://drupal.org/project/contemplate modules for Drupal 6

(I would really recommend using Display Suite - http://drupal.org/project/ds for Drupal 7)

Lastly, if you need help configuring all this stuff, there are plenty of awesome video tutorials over the net.

Hope you find this useful and let me know if you need any further clarification.

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Considering your above requirements it is good to use Mailchimp of Aweber,You can create a Feed for Each category and assign them to different lists. You have a automatic function to generate a newsletter from feeds(just like feedburner). Another great advantage of using aweber or mailchimp is you can customize the signup form as you like.

Aweber Drupal Module

Mailchimp Drupal Module

Note : it is good to use Mailchimp than Aweber since the above module is unstable and not available for drupal 7.

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I would highly recommend using phpList with the Drupal PHPlist Integration Module. It's worked perfectly for me in the past, and phpList is more advanced than any Drupal module you'll find.

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Simplenes is good but recently I had some problems when sending e-mails with simplenews newsletter module for Drupal. While this is a very good module, sometimes made Drupal cron to fail and stuck. I also wanted full control on sending mails and to avoid some of the limitations of Drupal cron timings. Since I didn't have the time to enhance the simplenews module I did this script to be sure that my mails are sent. This script needs simplenews newsletter module and Drupal in order to work. It has been tested with Drupal 7 (but should work on any version) and simplenews 7.

The script works out of drupal and speaks to the database so its better for performance and mail control. You can set the time step and the mails it sends every time based on your server sending limits. At the end logs any bad mails. For me it is the solution for sending my newsltters.

You can learn more and get the script from

http://tecorange.com/content/mail-send-addon-drupal-simplenews-newsletter

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