django-newsletter 0.4

What is it?

Django app for managing multiple mass-mailing lists with both plaintext as well as HTML templates with rich text widget integration, images and a smart queueing system all right from the admin interface.

Status

We are currently using this package in several large to medium scale production environments, but it should be considered a permanent work in progress.

Translations

Most if not all strings are available in Dutch, German and English. Contributions to translations are welcome through Transifex.

Requirements

Please refer to requirements.txt for an updated list of required packes.

Installation

1. Get it from the Cheese Shop:

   pip install django-newsletter

   Or get the latest & greatest from Github and link it to your application tree:

   pip install -e git://github.com/dokterbob/django-newsletter.git#egg=django-newsletter

   (In either case it is recommended that you use VirtualEnv in order to keep your Python environment somewhat clean.)

2. Add newsletter and to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py and make sure that your favourite rich text widget (optional), some Django contrib dependencies, sorl-thumbnail and django-extensions (the latter is used for the submission jobs) are there as well:

   INSTALLED_APPS = (
       'django.contrib.contenttypes',
       'django.contrib.sessions',
       'django.contrib.auth',
       'django.contrib.sites',
       ...
       # Imperavi (or tinymce) rich text editor is optional
       'imperavi',
       'django_extensions',
       'sorl.thumbnail',
       ...
       'newsletter',
       ...
   )

3. Install and configure your preferred rich text widget (optional). If not set, django-newsletter will fall back to Django’s default TextField widget:

   # Using django-imperavi (make sure to update urls.py when installing this)
   NEWSLETTER_RICHTEXT_WIDGET = "imperavi.widget.ImperaviWidget"
   
   # Using django-tinymce
   NEWSLETTER_RICHTEXT_WIDGET = "tinymce.widgets.TinyMCE"

4. Import subscription, unsubscription and archive URL’s somewhere in your urls.py:

   urlpatterns = patterns('',
       ...
       (r'^newsletter/', include('newsletter.urls')),
       ...
   )

5. Enable Django’s staticfiles app so the admin icons, CSS and JavaScript will be available where we expect it.

6. Create required data structure and load default template fixture:

   ./manage.py syncdb
   ./manage.py loaddata default_templates

7. Change the default contact email listed in templates/newsletter/subscription_subscribe.html and templates/newsletter/subscription_update.html.

8. Run the tests to see if it all works:

   ./manage.py test

   If this fails, please contact me! If it doesn’t: that’s a good sign, chap. You’ll probably have yourself a working configuration!

9. Add jobs for sending out mail queues to crontab:

   @hourly /path/to/my/project/manage.py runjobs hourly
   @daily /path/to/my/project/manage.py runjobs daily
   @weekly /path/to/my/project/manage.py runjobs weekly
   @monthly /path/to/my/project/manage.py runjobs monthly

South migrations / upgrading

Since 5f79f40, the app makes use of South for schema migrations. As of this version, using South with django-newsletter is the official recommendation and installing it is easy.

When upgrading from a pre-South version of newsletter to a current release (in a project for which South has been enabled), you might have to fake the initial migration as the DB tables already exist. This can be done by running the following command:

./manage.py migrate newsletter 0001 --fake

Usage

1. Start the development server: ./manage.py runserver

2. Navigate to /admin/ and: behold!

3. Put a submission in the queue.

4. Submit your message with ./manage.py runjob submit

5. For a proper understanding, please take a look at the model graph.

Unit tests

Fairly extensive tests are available for internal frameworks, web (un)subscription and mail sending. Sending a newsletter to large groups of recipients (+10k) has been confirmed to work in multiple production environments. Tests for pull req’s and the master branch are automatically run through Travis CI.

Feedback

If you find any bugs or have feature request for django-newsletter, don’t hesitate to open up an issue on GitHub (but please make sure your issue hasn’t been noticed before, finding duplicates is a waste of time). When modifying or adding features to django-newsletter in a fork, be sure to let me know what you’re building and how you’re building it. That way we can coordinate whether, when and how it will end up in the main fork and (eventually) an official release.

In general: thanks for the support, feedback, patches and code that’s been flowing in over the years! Django has a truly great community. <3

License

This application is released under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3.