Symphony.

Well, actually the extension has undergone a complete rewrite, and now the concept and the code are fine (I hope). But documentation (which is supposed to be rather verbose) still lacks.

The Members extension at it’s current state is only useful if you want to get your hands really dirty. I hope that after the release of Symphony 2.1 (I don’t expect a 2.0.7 release) this extension will get mature. Without any member management sending mass mailings is restricted to special cases - that is having “static” lists. So I didn’t feel the need to release the Email Newsletters extension.

That said, I would like to release the 0.9 version as soon as possible. If anybody needs it, I will make it available instantly.

I could give it a whirl for composing and sending, I would just keep my pommo for subscriptions, and dump the list in your extension.
Does it sent via smtp gmail, is bounce management or tracking possible without using the Members extension?

Does it sent via smtp gmail, is bounce management or tracking possible without using the Members extension?

At the moment the focus is on building emails (using Symphony pages) and sending (via authenticated SMTP, including throttling). There is no bounce management nor tracking nor personalization. (The latter will come soon, because I need it for one client. Should be rather easy to do.)

Email tracking is indeed very hard to do. As far as I know, you’ll never get anything else than “approximate” results as far as “opening statistics” are concerned. Actually the only way seems to use blind pixels…

Bounce management doesn’t seem simple either. If you simply count emails coming back, you’ll count autoresponders as well. So to make it useful, you would need to analyze error codes in those emails, wouldn’t you? Does anybody know more on this topic? (I actually don’t know much about this topic yet.)

The extension will load everything as Symphony pages:

• email HTML content (= HTML Symphony page)
• email TEXT content (= pure text Symphony page – this needs the Content Type Mappings extension to enable a proper preview in the browser)
• email recipients (= XML Symphony page)

The recipients part is the hard one (and it was a hard decision to build it this way). You will have to build an XML page from whatever your source is, which sounds a bit complicated. But the great thing is that you will have all the Symphony flexibility: Using several datasources, filtering datasources, XSLT. (There are security measures, of course, to not expose your recipients XML to the public.)

The TEXT page is special as well, because Symphony authors might be used to write Markdown plus HTML in their entries. That’s why I encourage building the TEXT page from HTML content using XSLT (and a modified version of my HTML To Markdown Text utility).

As you see, building everything from pages in Symphony will require a certain setup amount. And it will require good documentation. That’s where my doc still lacks the most. I will try and write the basics as soon as possible (which is Tuesday, probably).

And here, after all, the good thing about the extension: Once you got it set up, it is really damned easy to push out those newsletters. Any email code is controlled via Symphony (pages), so authors can not mess the emails up (like in Pommo).

great! looking forward to the release.

Michael, I would like to set a system up that emails pdf’s created in symphony. Therefor I would follow this guide.
Maybe I can build upon your work, since you already have swiftmailer in an extension?

Once again I have fallen sick, which makes it hard to get my work done. I am sorry for the extension being delayed. Still documentation is insufficient, so I won’t do any official release. But I will send it to you via email if you contact me. You’ll find my email on my contact page.