sending Drupal content with CiviMail

[joachim]

My project needs to send a regular newsletter featuring recent content from Drupal.

I'm thinking the simplest way to do this would be to assemble a node in Drupal first (using CCK noderef to pick further content to show as teasers) and then in the CiviMail form (sites/all/modules/civicrm/CRM/Mailing/Form/Upload.php) add a 3rd option for picking a Drupal node whose body should be used as the mail.

This sounds like a common use case -- featuring site content -- so I'm wondering if anyone's implemented this?

[tobiaseigen]

sounds cool - I actually manually assemble a newsletter every month with content from my site. I do this in a drupal node, then copy and paste the HTML code into a text editor to prepare it for mailing with civimail. This works very well and I have gotten quick at it.

Some method for automating the production of that newsletter node would be nice, but that's a drupal issue.

Cheers,

Tobias

[Donald Lobo]

you might want to check the ninjitsu module that composes a civimail from nodes

http://uascoop.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/drupal/modules/ninjitsu_newsletter/

lobo

[tobiaseigen]

you might want to check the ninjitsu module that composes a civimail from nodes

http://uascoop.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/drupal/modules/ninjitsu_newsletter/

lobo

wow - that's neat, thanks! know anybody who has done this?

cheers,

tobias

[Donald Lobo]

i think emily f in the northeast has used this with some of her clients

lobo

[gma]

Hi,
We have had a stab at this prior to the recent patch (http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,3848.msg17524.html#msg17524)

It worked ok, although from memory, we had a few issues with CSS and @import stylesheets. This meant that any styling had to be re-created through templates etc.  That's all fine, however the code auto copied from Drupal, needed some tidying up which meant that we were better off doing the whole thing manually anyway (as Tobias was doing above).

We are about to upgrade to 2.2, so I will give it another shot and let you all know how we go.

Cheers,
geoff.

[emilyf]

geoff,

how's progress on this? i'm looking to get it back up and running but from what i remember (it's been a LONG time since i visited this module) there were upgrade problems with D6. have you resolved it?

[kurosevic]

Is there any alternative to ninjitsu newsletter (or a version of ninjitsu for d6?)? at this point civicrm is so robust it would be very hard to believe that there isn't any node integration tools available for civimail.

[Donald Lobo]

hard to believe, but most likely true

please do consider stepping up and help migrate that module if important to you (else we'll have more folks in a few months still finding it hard to believe, and still true)

lobo

[gma]

Emily,
It has been a long time for me also. We are about to upgrade to Civi 3, so will spend some time testing then.

Sorry I have nothing for you, I will endeavour to post back as soon as I have something.

geoff,

how's progress on this? i'm looking to get it back up and running but from what i remember (it's been a LONG time since i visited this module) there were upgrade problems with D6. have you resolved it?

[kurosevic]

I absolutely would love to help develop a d6 version of this module... but my module dev experience is limited... so, I would need some guidance, if no one minds.

EDIT
------

Ok, i've updated all migration issues in the ninjitsu module except for one. (a menu issue)

function &ninjitsu_newsletter_get_issue_drop_down_data() {
  $issue_vocab_id = variable_get('ninjitsu_newsletter_issue_vid',  '');
  $vtree = taxonomy_get_tree($issue_vocab_id);
  $drop_down_data = array();
  foreach ($vtree as $issue) {
    $nodes = taxonomy_select_nodes(array($issue->tid));
    while ($nnode = db_fetch_object($nodes)) {
      $nnode = node_load($nnode);
      // only display issues that have nodes of the correct type
      if ($nnode->type == variable_get('ninjitsu_newsletter_main_node_type',  'newsletter')) {
        $drop_down_data[$issue->tid] = $issue->name . ' - ' . $nnode->title;
        break;
      }
    }
  }
  return $drop_down_data;
}


.. should not have loops in it in drupal 6. this one doesn't look like the  normal hook_menu format to me, so i'm confused about how to do this part. Any suggestions?

[linkx]

For anyone who finds this thread, please check out the project https://www.drupal.org/project/newsletter_export along with the tutorial at  http://www.freeform.ca/en/blog/updated-recipe-building-newsletters-drupal-7

[petednz]

The other option is this civicrm extension which pulls in Views display in to civimail via a token

https://civicrm.org/extensions/css-inline

http://fuzion.co.nz/blogs/styling-mails-civimails-civicrm

[FrTommy]

@petednz

I don't see any documentation for Eilleen's extension that says it will pull in views. Is this a hidden feature? If so, can you give some instructions on how to use it?

[petednz]

sorry - it was only referenced in the latter - https://github.com/eileenmcnaughton/civicrm_views_token