Q:Emergency question… how can I get either the email address as a variable in the template or an API to translate ID to email. Or I need to ability in the API to Add to Category by Subscriber ID. HELP!

joeworkman

There is a variable {$subscriber_mail} which is the subscribers email address.

Newsletter Mailer - What’s next? (with video of the new editor)

Some days ago I have created a survey regarding the next newsletter mailer version and the feedback was overwhelming. If you did not fill out the survey yet here is the link http://goo.gl/xpVx3 . I was planing to answer each feedback on its own but this is not possible because the number of feedbacks was much bigger than expected. I will take every feedback in account while designing and developing the next newsletter mailer.

From my point of view one of the main strengths (and maybe problems) of the current newsletter mailer most of the features where built after the first release on request of my customers. This resulted in a very powerful software and sadly any undocumented features. So the customer was not able to take advantage of all the possible features. One problem I am facing while coding updates for the current newsletter mailer is the backward compatibility. Bigger structure changes are not possible any more without braking the currently running versions. An other big problem is the php framework I am using in the current newsletter mailer. CakePhp uses mod_rewrite to dynamically address the php files, this usually works fine but some big hosting providers do not support mod_rewrite properly, this “small” problem caused a huge support effort on my side. An other problem with the current framework is the relatively big codebase which is actually not needed.

And now to the planed version. The user interface will be based on Twitter Bootstrap, the application is planed to be a single page web applications using Backbone.js, so on every click only the data will be reloaded not the entire page. This will make the newsletter mailer run faster and since the interface is entirely running on the client it will be able to notify the user about any validation errors instantly.

Template System

I actually had the impression that only a very small number of the current newsletter mailer take full advantage of the very dynamic Smarty template system, for this reason I wanted to remove it from the upcoming newsletter mailer. But since some survey users really like Smarty, mostly developers I think, I have decided to add the old system to my plans ( I can not guarantee backward compatibility.)

WYSIWYG Editor

In the past 2-3 months I was trying to build an easy to use but yet powerful newsletter WYSIWYG editor. The currently running version is based on vertical grid which contains multiple design elements (Text, Images, Last Tweets) or Layout elements (other grids). All the elements can be positioned using drag and drop gestures. Here is a small video showing the current version of the WYSIWYG editor, please watch the video in HD.  I will try to deliver a link to the running version of the WYSIWYG editor to all the beta testers by the end of this week. The editor is the the most important part of the newsletter mailer since the user be upset quickly if he isn’t able to realize the his desired design. An other important part in the development of the designer are the beta tester, since what looks intuitive to a software developer mostly isn’t really easy to use for the end-user.

Versions

I am planing to release 2 different versions of the mailer a single project version, which does not separate between the users and a multi user version, which can be used by web developers providing the newsletter mailer service to multiple users.

Time frame

If every thing works well the new newsletter mailer will be released in the beginning of 2013.

Thank you very much for your feedbacks, if you have any comments please use the comment section below. I am looking forward to release more information about the upcoming version soon.

Creating a Template for SimpleCMS

Creating a template for SimpleCms is very easy.

  1. Creating the template folder structure:
    Every Template has its own folder in the folder app/views/themed/
    In order to create your own template please create a new folder in app/views/themed/. The folder name will also be the template name. Please only use alphanumeric characters in the template name. After creating the template folder create a new folder called webroot in the template folder, in this folder you will store a all the asserts(css and images) used in the template. After that create a new folder called elements in the template folder. The layout and the customised menu will be stored in this folder.

  2. Another important file is the file settings.json in the template folder. This is the configuration file of the template:

    This file is written in the JSON format. The most important setting is the content_width setting, this setting is used to calculate the maximum width of the embedded smart tags. If you set the setting blueprint to 1, the simplecms will load the Blueprint CSS framework automatically. The setting googlefont allows you to automatically load a specific Google Web Font. The setting js and the setting css defines the css and js files which will be loaded on each page. If the files are stored in the folder templatename/webroot use the tag {base_theme_url} if the files are in app/webroot/ use {base_url}.

  3. Now comes the most important part the layout. The layout can be defined in the file elements/page.ctp which is a normal php file. Every thing written in this file will be placed between the  <body> tags. So please do not write the body and html tags. In the file page.ctp you have access to multiple variables:
    $site_name the name of the website
    $menu the menu html code
    $content the content of the current page
    Using the function Configure::read(‘ThemeSettings.design.big_logo’) you can access the user settings.

    A simple layout might look like this:

    If you want to customise the menu you must create a file called view.ctp in the folder templatename/menus/view.ctpwhich looks like this:
  4. I also recomment to take a look at the other templates in the folder app/view/themes to get an idea how things the system works.