django-newsletter

Newsletter application for the Django web framework.

What is it?

Django app for managing multiple mass-mailing lists with both plaintext as well as HTML templates with rich text widget integration, images and a smart queueing system all right from the admin interface.

Status

We are currently using this package in several large to medium scale production environments, but it should be considered a permanent work in progress.

Translations

Most if not all strings are available in Dutch, German, French, Farsi, Russian and English. Contributions to translations are welcome through Transifex.

Compatibility

Currently, django-newsletter is being tested to run on Python 2.6, 2.7 and the latest Django 1.4 and 1.5 releases. Apart from tests it should be compatible with Python 2.5 as well.

Requirements

Please refer to requirements.txt for an updated list of required packages.

Installation

1. Get it from the Cheese Shop:

   pip install django-newsletter
   

   Or get the latest & greatest from Github and link it to your application tree:

   pip install -e git://github.com/dokterbob/django-newsletter.git#egg=django-newsletter
   

   (In either case it is recommended that you use VirtualEnv in order to keep your Python environment somewhat clean.)

2. Add newsletter and to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py and make sure that your favourite rich text widget (optional), some Django contrib dependencies, sorl-thumbnail and django-extensions (the latter is used for the submission jobs) are there as well:

   INSTALLED_APPS = (
       'django.contrib.contenttypes',
       'django.contrib.sessions',
       'django.contrib.auth',
       'django.contrib.sites',
       ...
       # Imperavi (or tinymce) rich text editor is optional
       # 'imperavi',
       'django_extensions',
       'sorl.thumbnail',
       ...
       'newsletter',
       ...
   )
   

3. Disable email confirmation for subscribe, unsubscribe and update actions for subscriptions.

   By default subscribe, unsubscribe and update requests made by a user who is not logged in need to be confirmed by clicking on an activation link in an email. If you want all requested actions to be performed without email confirmation, add following line to settings.py:

   NEWSLETTER_CONFIRM_EMAIL = False
   

   For more granular control the NEWSLETTER_CONFIRM_EMAIL setting can be overridden for each of subscribe, unsubscribe and update actions, by adding NEWSLETTER_CONFIRM_EMAIL_SUBSCRIBE and/or NEWSLETTER_CONFIRM_EMAIL_UNSUBSCRIBE and/or NEWSLETTER_CONFIRM_EMAIL_UPDATE set to True or False.

4. Install and configure your preferred rich text widget (optional).

   Known to work are django-imperavi as well as for django-tinymce. Be sure to follow installation instructions for respective widgets. After installation, the widgets can be selected as follows:

   # Using django-imperavi
   NEWSLETTER_RICHTEXT_WIDGET = "imperavi.widget.ImperaviWidget"
   
   # Using django-tinymce
   NEWSLETTER_RICHTEXT_WIDGET = "tinymce.widgets.TinyMCE"
   

   If not set, django-newsletter will fall back to Django's default TextField widget.

5. Import subscription, unsubscription and archive URL's somewhere in your urls.py:

   urlpatterns = patterns('',
       ...
       (r'^newsletter/', include('newsletter.urls')),
       ...
   )
   

6. Enable Django's staticfiles app so the admin icons, CSS and JavaScript will be available where we expect it.

7. Create required data structure:

   ./manage.py syncdb
   

8. Change the default contact email listed in templates/newsletter/subscription_subscribe.html and templates/newsletter/subscription_update.html.

9. (Optionally) Create message template overrides for specific newsletters in templates/newsletter/message/<newsletter_slug>/<message_type>[_subject].<html|txt> where <message_type> can be one from subscribe, unsubscribe, message or update.

10. (Optionally) Run the tests to see if it all works:

    ./manage.py test
    

    If it does: that's a good sign. You'll probably have yourself a working configuration!

11. Add jobs for sending out mail queues to crontab:

    @hourly /path/to/my/project/manage.py runjobs hourly
    @daily /path/to/my/project/manage.py runjobs daily
    @weekly /path/to/my/project/manage.py runjobs weekly
    @monthly /path/to/my/project/manage.py runjobs monthly
    

Usage

1. Start the development server: ./manage.py runserver
2. Navigate to /admin/ and: behold!
3. Put a submission in the queue.
4. Submit your message with ./manage.py runjob submit
5. For a proper understanding, please take a look at the model graph.

Templates

To get started, we recommend copying the existing 'stub'-templates from the module directory to your project's templates dir:

cp -rv `python -c 'import newsletter; from os import path; print path.dirname(newsletter.__file__)'`/templates/newsletter <project_dir>/templates/

Web view templates

newsletter_list.html

Newsletter list view, showing all newsletters marked as public and allowing authenticated Django users to (un)subscribe directly.

newsletter_detail.html

Newsletter detail view, linking to subscribe, update, unsubscribe and archive views for a particular newsletter.

submission_archive.html

Archive; list of public submissions for a particular newsletter.

subscription_subscribe.html

Subscribe form for unauthenticated users.

subscription_subscribe_email_sent.html

Confirmation of subscription request.

subscription_activate.html

Activation form for (un)subscriptions or updates of unauthenticated users.

subscription_subscribe_activated.html

Confirmation of activation of subscription.

subscription_unsubscribe_activated.html

Confirmation of activation of unsubscription.

subscription_update_activated.html

Confirmation of activation of update.

subscription_subscribe_user.html

Subcribe form for authenticated users.

subscription_unsubscribe.html

Unsubscribe form for unauthenticated users.

subscription_unsubscribe_email_sent.html

Confirmation of unsubscription request.

subscription_unsubscribe_user.html

Unsubscribe form for authenticated users.

subscription_update.html

Update form for unauthenticated users.

subscription_update_email_sent.html

Confirmation of update request.

Email templates

Email templates can be specified per newsletter in message/<newsletter_slug>. If no newsletter-specific templates are found, the defaults in the message folder are used.

When a newsletter is configured to send HTML-messages, the HTML and txt are both used to create a multipart message. When the use of HTML is not configured only the text templates are used.

The following templates can be defined:

message.(html|txt)

Template for rendering a messages with the following context available:

• subscription: Subscription containing name and email of recipient.
• site: Current site object.
• submission: Current submission.
• message: Current message.
• newsletter: Current newsletter.
• date: Publication date of submission.
• STATIC_URL: Django's STATIC_URL setting.
• MEDIA_URL: Django's MEDIA_URL setting.

message_subject.txt

Template for the subject of an email newsletter. Context is the same as with messages.

subscribe.(html|txt)

Template with confirmation link for subscription.

subscribe_subject.txt

Subject template with confirmation link for subscription.

unsubscribe.(html|txt)

Template with confirmation link for unsubscription.

unsubscribe_subject.txt

Subject template with confirmation link for unsubscription.

update.(html|txt)

Template with confirmation link for updating subscriptions.unsubscription.

update_subject.txt

Subject template with confirmation link for updating subscriptions.unsubscription.

Unit tests

Fairly extensive tests are available for internal frameworks, web (un)subscription and mail sending. Sending a newsletter to large groups of recipients (+10k) has been confirmed to work in multiple production environments. Tests for pull req's and the master branch are automatically run through Travis CI.

Upgrading

0.5: Message templates in files

As of 0.5 message templates are living in the filesystem like normal files instead of resorting in the EmailTemplate in the database. In most cases, South should take care of writing your existing templates to disk and deleting the database models.

0.4: South migrations

Since 5f79f40, the app makes use of South for schema migrations. As of this version, using South with django-newsletter is the official recommendation and installing it is easy.

When upgrading from a pre-South version of newsletter to a current release (in a project for which South has been enabled), you might have to fake the initial migration as the DB tables already exist. This can be done by running the following command:

./manage.py migrate newsletter 0001 --fake

Feedback

If you find any bugs or have feature request for django-newsletter, don't hesitate to open up an issue on GitHub (but please make sure your issue hasn't been noticed before, finding duplicates is a waste of time). When modifying or adding features to django-newsletter in a fork, be sure to let me know what you're building and how you're building it. That way we can coordinate whether, when and how it will end up in the main fork and (eventually) an official release.

In general: thanks for the support, feedback, patches and code that's been flowing in over the years! Django has a truly great community. <3

Donations

Donations are welcome in Bitcoin or Paypal through Properster. For Bitcoin, the link/QRCode below should suffice. If you donate, be sure to fill in the note. I love to hear what people are using it for!

License

This application is released under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3.