SilverStripe Newsletter Module

Installation

This module requires silverstripe/cms and symbiote/silverstripe-queuedjobs and is compatible with SilverStripe 4.

composer require silverstripe/newsletter "2.x-dev"

Introduction

Overview

The module manages the creation and sending of newsletters through the CMS, in a very similar fashion to editing pages.

Features:

• WYSIWYG newsletter creation (incl. images and preview)
• HTML emails (with auto-conversion to text)
• Subscription page (in your own theme style)
• Subscription confirmation by email
• Unsubscribe by URL and web confirmation
• Queued email sending (requires "messagequeue" module)
• Batch sending and throttling
• Custom SilverStripe templates for emails
• Link tracking
• Recipient blacklisting
• Bounce tracking (experimental)
• Decoratable Recipient class to add more properties

Configuration

Email Templates

Newsletter templates are standard SilverStripe templates, with a few extra placeholders.

• UnsubscribeLink: Personalized link to unsubscribe from newsletter
• AbsoluteBaseURL: Absolute URL to the website
• To: Recipient email address
• From: Sender email address
• Subject: Newsletter subject
• Recipient.Title: Recipient full name, including salutation, first/middle/last name (all optional)
• Recipient.Salutation
• Recipient.FirstName
• Recipient.Surname
• Recipient.Email
• Now: Current date and time (format e.g. with $Now.Nice)

Templates are created in mysite/templates/Email. So for example, if you created Newsletter.ss inside mysite/templates/email then the plugin will recognise this new file and let you select it in the dropdown. You'll find a default template with minimal styling in templates/Emails/SimpleNewsletterTemplate.ss.

Template paths are configurable using the Config API

*mysite/_config/newsletter.yml*
:::yaml
SilverStripe\Newsletter\Control\NewsletterAdmin
    template_paths: 
        - "themes/mytemplate/templates/email";

Usage

Mailing Lists and Recipients

A mailing list (class MailingList) can contain many recipients (class Recipient). Both can be created through the "Newsletter" Admin UI. Each newsletter can be sent to one or more mailing lists. The current recipients of a mailing list are copied to a SendRecipientQueue once a newsletter sending process starts, fixing the mailing list state for this newsletter.

Queuing

Generating emails is processing intensive, at least on the scale of potentially several thousand recipients. We need a safe way to track already sent message in case of a fatal error halfway through. Also, sending large volumes of email in a short period of time can get you blacklisted. Which is why the newsletter uses a queue to send emails.

Each individual email for a newsletter is queued up as a SendRecipientQueue record. This queue is worked off by queued job NewsletterMailerJob in configurable batches. For more information about the queuing process see the symbiote/silverstripe-queuedjobs module.

Bounce Handling

The modules allows tracking of email "bounces" per recipient, for email which could not be delivered for some reason.

It's important to keep your mailing list clean of recipients which permanently deny delivery, in terms of decreasing the likelihood that your outgoing mail is classified as spam by other parties.

The Recipient model has BouncedCount and Blacklisted properties to track this. By default, this has to be handled manually by the recipient of your "reply-to" address as configured through the newsletter admin UI. This mailbox should be regularly scanned for bouned emails, and their original recipients blacklisted by ticking the "Blacklisted" checkbox in the admin UI for that recipient.

Note: This process can be automated by forwarding bounce emails to the "emailbouncehandler" module. This process is experimental at the moment, some assembly required.

Contributing

Translations

Translations of the natural language strings are managed through a third party translation interface, transifex.com. Newly added strings will be periodically uploaded there for translation, and any new translations will be merged back to the project source code.

Please use https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/silverstripe-newsletter/ to contribute translations, rather than sending pull requests with YAML files.

See the "i18n" topic on doc.silverstripe.org for more details.