collective.dancing 0.2

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

Contents

• What is it?

• Features

  • Future

• Installation

  • Installing S&D with Buildout

  • It’s installed. What’s next?

  • Processing the message queue

• Contact us

• Developers

What is it?

Singing & 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 & Dancing can’t do, it’s built to be easily extended via plug-ins using the Zope 3 Component Architecture.

Features

Modern and extensible

Singing & 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 & Dancing to fit your needs.

Well tested

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

Fully managable through the Plone interface

Singing & Dancing is fully usable out of the box. 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 & 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 & Dancing. Manage newsletter templates in a pool for easy reuse.

Installation

Singing & Dancing is available as Python eggs on PyPI. To install, you can simply depend on the collective.dancing package in your own site policy package, and add fakezope2eggs to your buildout configuration, as explained below.

Alternatively, add collective.dancing to the list of eggs in your buildout.cfg if you don’t have your own package. This is what we explain below.

Sadly, we don’t support Repoze at this poiint.

Installing S&D with Buildout

If you don’t know what buildout is or how to create a buildout, follow this tutorial first.

These instructions assume that you already have a Plone 3 buildout that’s built and ready to run.

1. Edit your buildout.cfg file and look for the eggs key in the instance section. Add collective.dancing to that list. Your list will look something like this:

   eggs =
       ${buildout:eggs}
       ${plone:eggs}
       collective.dancing

   In the same section, look for the zcml key. Add collective.dancing here, too:

   zcml = collective.dancing

2. Still in your buildout configuration file, at the top of the file, in the buildout section, you’ll find the parts. Add to these the fakezope2eggs part that we’re about to create, like this:

   parts =
       plone
       zope2
       fakezope2eggs
       productdistros
       instance
       zopepy

   We’ll add the configuration for the actual part at the end of buildout.cfg:

   [fakezope2eggs]
   recipe = affinitic.recipe.fakezope2eggs
   additional-fake-eggs = ZODB3

3. Now that we’re done editing the buildout configuration file, we can run buildout again:

   $ ./bin/buildout -v

4. That’s it! You can now start up your Zope instance, and then install Singing & Dancing in your Plone site by visiting the Add-on Products site control panel.

   Should these instructions not work for you, contact us.

It’s installed. What’s next?

You’ll now have an entry in the control panel to Singing & Dancing. This will lead you to to the advanced configuration panel of S&D.

Note that there’s already a default newsletter set up for your convenience. You can create a Channel subscribe portlet to enable your users to subscribe to this channel, or you can point them to http://yoursite/portal_newsletters/channels/default-channel/subscribe.html

To send out a newsletter, go to any portal object, like the Plone front page, and click Actions -> Send as newsletter.

The advanced configuration panel of S&D gives you many more ways to send newsletters, like periodically and from automatically collected content.

Processing the message queue

One important thing to note is that S&D usually queues messages in its own message queue before sending them out. You might have noticed that when you send out a newsletter, S&D tells you that it queued the messages.

In a production setup, you would normally process the message queue periodically using the built-in Zope ClockServer. While you’re testing, you can visit the Statistics screen in the S&D advanced configuration panel and manually flush the queues. If your mail configuration in Plone is set up correctly, you should be sending mail out now.

To set up ClockServer to trigger the processing automatically for you, add this stanza to the Zope 2 instance section of your buildout configuration and rerun bin/buildout -v:

zope-conf-additional =
    <clock-server>
      method /portal/@@dancing.utils/tick_and_dispatch
      period 300
      user admin
      password admin
      host localhost
    </clock-server>

This will process the message queue every five minutes. It assumes that your Plone site is called portal and that your username and password are admin.

Contact us

If you have a question, or comment, get in touch with us! Our mailing list is a good place to do so. If you find a bug, please let us know. We also have an IRC channel called #singing-dancing on Freenode.

Developers

Singing & Dancing is built from scratch to be extensible. All components described in the interfaces.py file in collective.singing are pluggable.

Developer documentation exists in the form of doctests and Zope 3 interfaces in the source tree. To check out the development buildout, type this into your terminal:

svn co http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/collective.dancing/trunk-buildout singing-dancing-dev

When the checkout is complete, you can find the doctests in *.txt files in the src/collective.singing/collective/singing/ and src/collective.dancing/collective/dancing/ directories. There’s also a documentation area for use cases and manuals in src/collective.dancing/docs/.

Get in touch with us if you need help or have comments. See the Contact us section.