collective.dancing 0.6.3

Future

A couple of features that we’re going to implement in the near future:

Newsletter templates

Take complete control over how the newsletters look that are sent out. Create your own template or one of the templates that come pre-installed with the Singing & Dancing. Manage newsletter templates in a pool for easy reuse.

Installing S&D with Buildout

If you don’t know what buildout is or how to create a buildout, follow this tutorial first.

These instructions assume that you already have a Plone 3 buildout that’s built and ready to run.

1. Edit your buildout.cfg file and look for the eggs key in the instance section. Add collective.dancing to that list. Your list will look something like this:

   eggs =
       ${buildout:eggs}
       ${plone:eggs}
       collective.dancing

   In the same section, look for the zcml key. Add collective.dancing here, too:

   zcml = collective.dancing

2. Still in your buildout configuration file, look for the [zope2] section (which uses the plone.recipe.zope2install recipe), and add the following lines to it:

   fake-zope-eggs = true
   additional-fake-eggs = ZODB3
   skip-fake-eggs =
       zope.testing
       zope.component
       zope.i18n
       zope.sendmail

3. Now that we’re done editing the buildout configuration file, we can run buildout again:

   $ ./bin/buildout -v

4. That’s it! You can now start up your Zope instance, and then install Singing & Dancing in your Plone site by visiting the Add-on Products site control panel.

Troubleshooting

Should these instructions not work for you, contact us.

Here’s a list of the most common stumbling blocks:

• ValueError: too many values to unpack

• Products/Five/i18n.zcml uses namespace package in configure package directive

• Should you see ImportError: Module zope.app.component.metaconfigure has no global defaultLayer when starting up, make sure you have plone.recipe.zope2install >= 2.2. You may use buildout’s versions feature to tell it which version to use.

It’s installed. What’s next?

You’ll now have an entry in the control panel to Singing & Dancing. This will lead you to to the advanced configuration panel of S&D.

Note that there’s already a default newsletter set up for your convenience. You can create a Channel subscribe portlet to enable your users to subscribe to this channel, or you can point them to http://yoursite/portal_newsletters/channels/default-channel/subscribe.html

To send out a newsletter, go to any portal object, like the Plone front page, and click Actions -> Send as newsletter.

The advanced configuration panel of S&D gives you many more ways to send newsletters, like periodically and from automatically collected content.

Processing the message queue

One important thing to note is that S&D usually queues messages in its own message queue before sending them out. You might have noticed that when you send out a newsletter, S&D tells you that it queued the messages.

In a production setup, you would normally process the message queue periodically using the built-in Zope ClockServer. While you’re testing, you can visit the Statistics screen in the S&D advanced configuration panel and manually flush the queues. If your mail configuration in Plone is set up correctly, you should be sending mail out now.

To set up ClockServer to trigger the processing automatically for you, add this stanza to the Zope 2 instance section of your buildout configuration and rerun bin/buildout -v:

zope-conf-additional =
    <clock-server>
      method /portal/@@dancing.utils/tick_and_dispatch
      period 300
      user admin
      password admin
      host localhost
    </clock-server>

This will process the message queue every five minutes. It assumes that your Plone site is called portal and that your username and password are admin.

Note: You must not set up this ClockServer on more than one instance. The processing makes sure it’s not invoked twice at the same time by using file locking.

Configuring zope.sendmail to send out messages

Singing & Dancing uses zope.sendmail to send out its mail. S&D comes with a default configuration for zope.sendmail in its collective/dancing/mail.zcml file. This configuration will read SMTP parameters from your Plone site.

Be warned however, that this default configuration is not suitable for high-volume newsletters. The aforementioned configuration file contains an example configuration using mail:queuedDelivery that works much more reliable when dealing with a large number of mails.

Version 0.6.3 - 2008-09-01

• Have the S&D SMTPMailer subclass from zope.sendmail’s. This allows the use of TLS with the standard configuration and fixes #263271.

Version 0.6.2 - 2008-08-28

• Updated docs with information on how to configure mail:queuedDelivery of zope.sendmail. [nouri]

• Make the PloneCallHTMLFormatter which is the fallback formatter for all objects more robust. [tmog]

• Improve internationalization with newsletter object titles. [tmog]

• Fixed a bug in csv-export if you use more composer_data than just email address. [saily]

• Some people have reported that S&D is sending out duplicate mails on high-traffic newsletters. I’ve added a StubSMTPMailer utility, which you can register conveniently in collective/dancing/mail.zcml. No mail will be sent out when it’s configured instead of the default one. This allows you to debug and fine-tune settings, e.g. those of your configured mail:queuedDelivery component. [nouri]

• Changed batch_size in browser/channel.py to 30 to stay at Plone’s default. [saily]

• German translation updated. [saily]

• Rebuild of collective.dancing.pot using i18ndude. Some translation updates needed. [saily]

Version 0.6.1 - 2008-08-22

• On reinstall, advise QuickInstaller not to delete the five.intid tool that we set up during installation. This fixes the brokenness of the subscription catalogs after a reinstall. A typical error you’d see would look like:

  ...
   Module collective.singing.subscribe, line 227, in subscription_modified
   Module collective.singing.subscribe, line 214, in _catalog_subscription
   Module five.intid.intid, line 36, in getId
   Module zope.app.intid, line 86, in getId
  KeyError: SimpleSubscription ...

  No migration is available at this point. Contact us if you need help writing one. Note that the use of QuickInstaller reinstallation isn’t required with Singing & Dancing. For how to run upgrades from one version to the next, please see the Upgrade section. A QuickInstaller reinstallation will not run these upgrades for you. [nouri]

Version 0.6.0 - 2008-08-21

• Update to use Singing’s new IMessageAssemble API. [nouri]

• Use batching for the subscriptions management view. Also, reshuffle the order of tabs in the channel administration view. Most notably: move the “Subscriptions” tab to the first position to allow more comfortable editing. [nouri]

Version 0.5.1 - 2008-08-15

• Fixed a bug where a collector would have a Title property; this should be a method. [malthe]

• Added permissions to send, preview and manage newsletter. No upgrade steps required - just reinstall. By default - send and preview is allowed to reviewer and manager role, manage newsletters for managers only. [saily]

Version 0.5.0 - 2008-07-29

• Display a more user friendly error message when the user attempts to add duplicate subscriptions. [miziodel, nouri]

• List of subscribers can now be uploaded and downloaded in CSV format! [skatja]

• Depend on 0.3 or higher of plone.app.z3cform. [nouri]

Version 0.4.1 - 2008-07-23

• Fix RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded error in Module collective.dancing.browser.portlets.channelsubscribe, line 253, in channel when displaying portlets that were created prior to 0.4b4. [nouri]

Version 0.4 - 2008-07-23

Version 0.3 - 2008-06-03

Version 0.2 - 2008-05-06

• Add an ‘Already subscribed?” section to the “My subscriptions” page to retrieve your password. [nouri]

• added i18n:domain to browser/controlpanel-links.pt, removed extra quotes from browser/channel.py, updated pot and danish translation [bartholdy]

• updated .pot and danish translation [bartholdy]

• apparently triplequoted strings do not get translated .. this takes care of https://bugs.launchpad.net/singing-dancing/+bug/218448 [bartholdy]

• Don’t use locale-dependent ‘string.letters’ when creating the ISalt utility. This fixes https://bugs.launchpad.net/singing-dancing/+bug/217823 [nouri]

• Extended portlet with optinal footertext [bartholdy]

• Added functionality to show a preview in the browser [malthe]