Emencia Django Newsletter

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.

Contents

• Features
• Architecture
  • Content types
  • Cronjob/Command
• Installation
  • Applications
  • Template Context Processors
  • Urls
  • Media Files
  • Synchronization
• DBMS considerations
• HOWTO couple your profile application with emencia.django.newsletter
• Database Representation

Features

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.
• Unsubscriptions to mailing list.
• Unique urls for an user.
• Tracking statistics.

Architecture

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

Content types

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.

Cronjob/Command

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.

Installation

First of all you need to install emencia.django.newsletter into your PYTHON_PATH.

Applications

Then register emencia.django.newsletter, admin and contenttypes in your INSTALLED_APPS section your project settings.

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

Template Context Processors

Add the 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',
>>>   )

Urls

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')),

Media Files

You have to make a symbolic link from emencia/django/newsletter/media/ 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.

Synchronization

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

DBMS considerations

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.

HOWTO couple your profile application with emencia.django.newsletter

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.

Database Representation