collective.dancing 0.1dev-r62029

The all-singing all-dancing newsletter product for Plone.

What is it?

Singing and Dancing is the next generation newsletter Product for Plone. It’s an out of the box solution that works without modification for most of your use cases. And should you find something that Singing and Dancing can’t do, it’s built to be easily extended via plug-ins using the Zope 3 Component Architecture.

Singing and Dancing is still under heavy development. We consider it stable, but there are going to be API changes in the future.

Features

Modern and extensible

Singing and Dancing builds on the latest and greatest efforts in the Zope and Plone world. It makes heavy use of the excellent z3c.form library and the Zope 3 Component Architecture. This allows you to easily plug in and extend Singing and Dancing to fit your needs.

Well tested

An extensive suite of automated tests make Singing and Dancing exceptionally stable and reliable. We currently have 200+ tests. Singing and Dancing is not gonna leave you in the lurch!

Fully managable through the Plone interface

Singing and Dancing is fully usable out the web. An extensive set of forms reachable through the configuration panel let you as the user configure many details of your newsletters, like when they’re sent (periodically or manually), what is sent (through the use of the Smart Folder interface, or manually), and to whom.

Subscriptions

Singing and Dancing uses confirmed subscription, i.e. subscribers receive an e-mail to confirm their subscription. Users can subscribe via a standard subscription form that lists all available newsletters in the site, or through individual subscription forms, e.g. in portlets.

Future

A couple of features that we’re going to implement in the near future:

Newsletter templates

Take complete control over how the newsletters look that are sent out. Create your own template or one of the templates that come pre-installed with the Singing and Dancing. Manage newsletter templates in a pool for easy reuse.

Installation

For deploying Singing and Dancing in production, you want to use a buildout. A buildout for the development of Singing and Dancing itself is available at:

https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/collective.dancing/trunk-buildout

This buildout includes the development versions of the collective.singing and collective.dancing packages. For production use, you can start by copying the buildout.cfg from this development buildout, but modify it to not use development versions but eggs from the CheeseShop. To do this, remove this section:

develop =
    src/collective.singing
    src/collective.dancing

Of course you can just add these two packages to your already existing buildout or to your Repoze setup. When using Buildout, make sure you use the fakezope2eggs recipe to avoid downloading incompatible versions of Zope 3 packages into your buildout.