CIVIMAIL: Automated RSS-Driven Newsletter

[lowfidb]

Hi,

While we generally love CiviMail for mailings, there's something that MailChimp offers that we really want.

One of the things that would save a non-profit like ours a ton of time is an automated RSS-driven newsletter. Mail Chimp offers this feature. It pulls website material from an rss feed at a regular (chosen) interval, inserts it into a template and sends it out. This would make the lives of small non-profits so much better and allow us to concentrate more on the other important work we're engaged in.

So, is this possible in CiviCRM? If so, what would it take to get it integrated into CiviMail? We're not really interested in the MailChimp integration, we're much more keen on this feature.

Thanks!
Devin

[petednz]

Hey Devin

Eileen has done some work on an extension for Views tokens

Not sure what CMS you are on - but it lets you build a View (ie a dynamic list of content based on your criteria) then you can include the token in a civimail - doesn't deal with the step of having civimail do this on an automated basis but might get you a step closer if you are on drupal

[lowfidb]

Hey Pete,

Alas, I'm running CiviCRM on Joomla.

That's why I was excited about a CMS-agnostic solution like using an RSS feed to pull the content into the newsletter.

I was particularly intrigued given this piece in the New York Times today about the death of the e-newsletter being greatly exaggerated - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/business/media/for-email-a-death-greatly-exaggerated.html?_r=0

Anyone else interested in the idea?

[capo]

It looks interesting to me, too! I've a project I'd like to address next year that will need something like that, as long as sometimes, our sources are websites non-related with our CiviCRM instance (but have, or can easily have RSS).

The possibility of scheduling newsletters, based on a RSS sources to predetermined mailing groups, sounds pretty generic and useful.

[Chris Burgess]

Check out the CiviCRM Mailing API - we (Fuzion) did similar for another client, but instead of "RSS feed sees new item" it's "New press release is published" and the API call pushes the mailing from the site with press releases to the CiviCRM install over HTTP.

So you'd trigger a civicrm_api('mailing', 'create', $params) whenever the RSS feed sees a new item. Done

[capo]

Anyone else interested in the idea?

Please, contact me if you're still interested in this module, so we can talk and try to work together on it. :-)

P.S.: My email address is ccapote AT es.amnesty.org.