Simplenews is our chosen module which will allow clubs to have email newsletters available for subscription on their web site. Simplenews allows the user to subscribe via a double opt in, double opt out system. The web site can have one or many newsletters available for visitors to subscribe to.
Simplenews is available in the standard and advanced packages.
You can get to the Simplenews administration by clicking through "Administer > Site configuration > Simplenews". Once you click in to that menu there are four submenu items that are available for the administration and use of the Simplenews newsletter management system.
By going to Administer > Content management" you can see the front end content process of newsletters.
These tools provide the ability to search through previously sent, and queued up newsletters with the "Sent issues" and "Draft issues" pages. These lists have the ability to list all the newsletters, list them by individual newsletters or view orphaned newsletters.
In addition to viewing the newsletters archives, the content administrator can also search through the subscriber list that can be filtered with provided tools that can filter by newsletter that the subscriber subscribed to as well as by email address to find specific subscribers. The content administrator also has the ability to activate, deactivate and delete individual users and groups of users, as well as edit the subscripers subscription list.
Lastly, and perhaps most obviously, there is also the page in which you create your newsletter categories.
The subscription page of Simplenews administration is the simple management of the automated emails that get sent when users subscribe, unsubscribe and other related actions. Each of these email templates also has a list of variables that can be inserted in the email template, and, when sending, those variables will be replaced with site, newsletter and user specific information for that newsletter.
| Variable | Replaced With |
| !site | The name of the web site |
| !uri | The URL/URI of the web site |
| !mailto | Email address of the subscriber |
| !date | Date of request |
| !newsletter_name | Name of the Newsletter |
| !confirm_subscribe_url | URL/URI to validate subscription |
| !confirm_unsubscribe_url | URL/URI to validate unsubscription |
On the whole the preselected email templates are perfectly suitable for most any situation, however, if you choose to customize them to your own liking it is easy enough.
There are templates for when a user subscribes, providing with with a link to validate the subscription, when the user unsubscribes, with a link to validate that, for a user that subscribes but the systems finds that email address already is subscribed, and for an unsubscribe request for whom a subscription is not found.
The Send mail administration tools are pretty basic and really, didn't be messed with in the vast majority of situations. Quite honestly, the average user of our system is best off simply not messing with these settings, but we will, in the interest of full disclosure, tell you about them.
These tools set whether or not to use a crontab to schedule tasks (which has to be set by us, the admins of the system), how to throttle the crontab, whether or not to log sends and when to expire the messages in the spool after successfully sending the message.
If much of that means nothing to you, you are likely best off not messing with the settings.