The problematic was :

How to couple a contact base to a mailing list and sending newsletters throught Django ?

Imagine that we have an application containing some kind of profiles or something like the django.contrib.auth and you want to send newsletters to them and tracking the activity.

More than a long speech, here the list of the main features :

• Coupling capacities with another django model.
• Variables can be used in the newsletter's templates.
• Mailing list managements (merging, importing...).
• Import/Export of the contact in VCard 3.0.
• Configurable SMTP servers with flow limit management.
• Working groups.
• Can send newsletter previews.
• Subscriptions and unsubscriptions to mailing list.
• Attachments in newsletters.
• Unique urls for an user.
• Tracking statistics.
• Email verification
• Templates

At the level of the application architecture, we can see 2 originalities who need to be explained.

The content types application is used to link any Contact model instance to another model instance. This allow you to create different kinds of contact linked to differents application, and retrieve the association at anytime.

This is particulary usefull with the templates variables if certain informations are located in the model instance linked.

The emencia.django.newsletter application will never send the newsletters registered in the site until you launch the send_newsletter command. :

$ python manage.py send_newsletter

This command will launch the newsletters who need to be launched accordingly to the credits of the SMTP server of the newsletter. That's mean that not all newsletters will be expedied at the end of the command because if you use a public SMTP server you can be banished temporarly if you reach the sending limit. To avoid banishment all the newsletters are not sended in the same time and immediately.

So it is recommanded to create a cronjob for launching this command every hours for example.

Make sure to install these packages prior to installation :

• Django >= 1.2
• html2text
• BeautifulSoup
• django-tagging
• vobject
• xlwt
• xlrd

The package below is optionnal but handy for rendering a webpage in your newsletter.

• lxml

You could retrieve the last sources from http://github.com/Fantomas42/emencia-django-newsletter and running the installation script :

$ python setup.py install

or use pip :

$ pip install -e git://github.com/Fantomas42/emencia-django-newsletter.git#egg=emencia.django.newsletter

For the latest stable version use easy_install :

$ easy_install emencia.django.newsletter

Then register emencia.django.newsletter, admin, contenttypes and tagging in the INSTALLED_APPS section of your project's settings. :

INSTALLED_APPS = (
  # Your favorites apps
  'django.contrib.contenttypes',
  'django.contrib.sites',
  'django.contrib.admin',
  'django.contrib.sessions',
  'tagging',
  'emencia.django.newsletter',)

Add these following template context processors if not already present. :

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
  'django.core.context_processors.auth',
  'django.core.context_processors.i18n',
  'django.core.context_processors.request',
  'django.core.context_processors.media',
  'emencia.django.newsletter.context_processors.media',)

In your project urls.py adding this following line to include the newsletter's urls for serving the newsletters in HTML. :

url(r'^newsletters/', include('emencia.django.newsletter.urls')),

Note this urlset is provided for convenient usage, but you can do something like that if you want to customize your urls : :

url(r'^newsletters/', include('emencia.django.newsletter.urls.newsletter')),
url(r'^mailing/', include('emencia.django.newsletter.urls.mailing_list')),
url(r'^tracking/', include('emencia.django.newsletter.urls.tracking')),
url(r'^statistics/', include('emencia.django.newsletter.urls.statistics')),

You have to make a symbolic link from emencia/django/newsletter/media/edn/ directory to your media directory or make a copy named edn, but if want to change this value, define NEWSLETTER_MEDIA_URL in the settings.py as appropriate.

Don't forget to serve this url.

Now you can run a syncdb for installing the models into your database.

It's not recommended to use SQLite for production use. Because is limited to 999 variables into a SQL query, you can not create a Mailing List greater than this limitations in the Django's admin modules. Prefer MySQL ou PgSQL.

It can be usefull for the end user to have a WYSIWYG editor for the creation of the newsletter. The choice of the WYSIWYG editor is free and the described method can be applied for anything, but we will focus on TinyMCE because he has many features and a usefull plugin for loading templates within it.

First of all install the django-tinymce application into your project.

That's done, enjoy !

If you wan to quickly import your contacts into a mailing list for example, you can write an admin's action for your model.

We suppose that we have the fields email, first_name and last_name in a models name Profile.

In his AdminModel definition add this method and register it into the actions property. :

class ProfileAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):

    def make_mailing_list(self, request, queryset):
        from emencia.django.newsletter.models import Contact
        from emencia.django.newsletter.models import MailingList

        subscribers = []
        for profile in queryset:
          contact, created = Contact.objects.get_or_create(email=profile.mail,
                                                           defaults={'first_name': profile.first_name,
                                                                     'last_name': profile.last_name,
                                                                     'content_object': profile})
        subscribers.append(contact)
        new_mailing = MailingList(name='New mailing list',
                                  description='New mailing list created from admin/profile')
        new_mailing.save()
        new_mailing.subscribers.add(*subscribers)
        new_mailing.save()
        self.message_user(request, '%s succesfully created.' % new_mailing)
    make_mailing_list.short_description = 'Create a mailing list'

    actions = ['make_mailing_list',]

This action will create or retrieve all the Contact instances needed for the mailing list creation.

After this you can send a newsletter to this mailing list.

A Buildout script is provided to properly initialize the project for anybody who wants to contribute.

First of all, please use VirtualEnv to protect your system.

Follow these steps to start the development : :

$ git clone git://github.com/Fantomas42/emencia-django-newsletter.git
$ virtualenv --no-site-packages emencia-django-newsletter
$ cd emencia-django-newsletter
$ source ./bin/activate
$ python bootstrap.py
$ ./bin/buildout

The buildout script will resolve all the dependancies needed to develop the application.

Once these operations are done, you are ready to develop on the project.

Run this command to launch the tests. :

$ ./bin/test

Or you can also launch the demo. :

$ ./bin/demo syncdb
$ ./bin/demo runserver

Pretty easy no ?

If you want to contribute by updating a translation or adding a translation in your language, it's simple: create a account on Transifex.net and you will be able to edit the translations at this URL :

http://www.transifex.net/projects/p/emencia-django-newsletter/resource/djangopo/

The translations hosted on Transifex.net will be pulled periodically in the repository, but if you are in a hurry, send me a message.

Simply set the option NEWSLETTER_TRACKING_IGNORE_ANCHOR = True to track no ankers in your email.

The goal of this option is so send emails with a template that has ankers, but if NEWSLETTER_TRACKING_LINKS is enabled, the ankers won't work.

!IMPORTANT! This modification has no backwards compatibility support. !IMPORTANT!

After installation of the newsletter, subcriber verification is set to NEWSLETTER_SUBSCRIBER_VERIFICATION = True. If there is no need for, set it on False.

To set an reply email adress, you will edit the option NEWSLETTER_DEFAULT_HEADER_REPLY in settings.py for example to Freshmilk NoReply<noreply@freshmilk.tv>.

The subscriber verification has a table called SubscriberVerifications. If an user subscribes over the <host>/newsletters/subscribe page, the view will create a Contact in the contacts table and will also generate a uuid which is saved with the new Contact in SubscriberVerifications. After an call of <host>/newsletters/subscribe/<uuid> the view will delete the row in SubscriberVerifications and set the Contact in contacts as verified.

Thats all. :)

• <host>/newsletters/subscribe > to subscribe the email
• <host>/newsletters/subscribe/<uuid> > to verificate the email

• subscriber_verification.html > to subscribe the email
• uuid_verification.html > to verificate the email

• if you had more than one mailing list, all will shown in the verification link
• if you had only one mailing list, the user will add to this one
• translations are made for en and de. Please run makemessages for other languages

If you update from a prior version of this newsletter, please run dbshell and add the column vriefied to newsletter_contact.

sqlite command :

ALTER TABLE newsletter_contact ADD COLUMN verified bool;