Ideas for HTML newsletter 1.4

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 383

Sorted!
I'll send you a link once the first newsletter is sent out so you can see the theme.
This was actually for a friends Harry Potter fan site so she is well pleased with the result.
What I did was send a test newsletter which then creates the testmail.php file. Opened that in dreamweaver, removing the starting php tag so DW will display the page in wysiwyg then made the adjustments to the template file.
Yes, very tedious but took only 30 minutes of intense concentration.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1294

Most excellent news! Yes, would be interested in seeing your handiwork.

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 383

Include data for GCalender (when GCalendar is active and installed).
i would probably like to be able send the current month and the following months 'events'.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1294

Yet another good idea... I really have a bunch of ideas to bump this to 2.0. I want it to be more like nukeSEO where new content can be added very easily. <sigh>

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 383

Multi lingual support please!
What I mean is, within nuke, when you post news you can select the language which it appears in.
For example, lets say you have multi lingual turned on and you are using English and Polish (other language files are removed) is it feasable to check the user prefs for the email account it is sending to and the send any language related content such as news out in the email under the users preferred language?

I hope that makes sense?

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1294

It does and is already on the list (not necessarily for 1.4), but it is not that easy. Just like with news, you have to be concerned with the content and its language. So, I am pretty sure that different newsletters will have to be created/sent.

For example, you create one in English, pick your "to" group and then it sends the newsletter to anyone with no language (i.e., "ALL") or with English as their language. Then, you create the next newsletter, pick Polish, pick the same "to" group and then it sends it only to those with Polish as their language.

The above is "doable", but then I am still not sure how to deal with the dynamically generated content part. Does each newsletter get "built" with only the selected language of content too? That will work with News, but I don't think much of the other provided content is truly multi-lingual.

Basically, this isn't as easy as it initial sounded, even to me, which is why it is going to have to be a future future release. However, your ideas on how multilingual should work, will be invaluable.

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 383

This 'idea' only came into my head as I have a specific need. I can therefore only put forward more data for that specific need.
As you rightly point out, nuke doesn't have *real* mutlilingual support except in the way it handles defined text sent to the browser (the language files) and even this is flawed (something I intend to correct in 2008).

I have never had the need for multilingual content before so what I'm seeing in terms of how nukes provides this is leaving me really disappointed but also it has given me a renewed appreciation for the work Susann has done.
I could of course skirt the issue entirely and use Joomla or Xoops which does have the multilingual support I need but I want to use *nuke.

Now that's out of the way, to address my specific needs;
The only true multilingual support in *nuke is the way it handles news. When news is posted you can select whether the news is for a specific language or 'all' languages. When the news is displayed in the browser, it very kindly only shows news posted in the users preferred language unless the news post was for 'all' languages in which case it will display those as well.

As the site I'm building will be specifically for both English and Polish and will make high use of 'news', I got to thinking that as both English native speaking users and Polish native speakers would have their preferences set in their profile, it would be nice to only send them news in their preferred language (as well as those news items marked as 'all' languages) in the newsletter without having to do multiple newsletter sends. It would also be a great feature for what is already the best Newsletter module for nuke.

Of course it is possible as an immediate work around to simply create two groups - one for English and one for Polish and do it that way, this would only require two newsletter sends as you have intimated and is a completely viable option. The only thing is the maintanence aspects of having to assign each new user to a specific group - though I guess if the two groups were public, the users could assign themselves.

The site is for a language school in Poland and it's users will be predominantly either English or Polish. The newsletter will be sent to both students and local business' (so the default language for the site will therefore need to be Polish) but equally, there wil be both Polish and English people actually 'posting' news items.

Now I'm on my third or fourth coffee this whole thing has my head going off at tangents on how nuke can be truly multilingual <sigh> time to fire up PHPed and see how news does it and see if the same can be applied to other area's like Content.....
See you next year Wink

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1294

The other content areas could very much be modified to be language "aware". It would take some table changes and code changes... but, as you know, anything can be done with time. Smile

Newbie Joined: Dec 11, 2005 Posts: 28

Sorry to jump in so late on this...

Multi-language support is on the to do list for nukeFEED, but it's a pretty low priority compared with other things on the to do list. I considered it for the first release, but there wasn't much point in providing the ability to support multi-language feeds of mostly single-language content...

Seems like most projects are journeys...and this one (HTML Newsletter) is definitely on the right path! Smile

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1294

kguske wrote:

Seems like most projects are journeys...and this one (HTML Newsletter) is definitely on the right path! Smile

Unfortunately HTML Newsletter's path went out to never-never land, but it finally came back. Laughing

It is about time I get back to crackin' on this thing...

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 383

Woohoo now I have an excuse to get my whip out Wink

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1294

oh my... you are concerning me my friend... lol.

Newbie Joined: Dec 11, 2005 Posts: 28

A little too much for the new year, eh?

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 383