The all-singing all-dancing newsletter product for Plone.
Project description
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.
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.dancingIn the same section, look for the zcml key. Add collective.dancing here, too:
zcml = collective.dancing
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 zopepyWe’ll add the configuration for the actual part at the end of buildout.cfg:
[fakezope2eggs] recipe = affinitic.recipe.fakezope2eggs additional-fake-eggs = ZODB3
Now that we’re done editing the buildout configuration file, we can run buildout again:
$ ./bin/buildout -v
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.
Note: You must not set up this ClockServer on more than one instance. The processing makes sure it’s not invoked twice at the same time by using file locking.
Upgrade
If you’re upgrading your version of Singing & Dancing, it might be that you need to run an upgrade of the database. In the portal_setup tool in the ZMI, visit the Upgrades tab and run any available new upgrades for the collective.dancing:default profile.
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/.
The latest version of collective.dancing itself can also be found in the Subversion repository.
Get in touch with us if you need help or have comments. See the Contact us section.
History
Version 0.4 - unreleased
New features
The confirmation view will now confirm pending subscriptions to any channel. This saves us from having to send a separate confirmation e-mail for every channel a user subscribes to. This feature isn’t used anywhere in S&D core at this point, but it’s useful if you’re writing custom subscription forms. [nouri]
Added SubjectsCollectorBase template class that you can use to create a collector based on a vocabulary. This vocabulary may come from anywhere, like from ATVocabularyManager or from the list of all subjects/tags available in your site. [nouri]
Text fields will now per default not be included in the resulting message if there are no sibling collectors that produced items. E.g. if you have a heading text and a sibling topic collector, the heading won’t appear if the topic didn’t return any items. [nouri]
Version 0.3 - 2008-06-03
New features
Add translations to German. [saily]
Added preview also to channel view. This was previously only available for the “send as newsletter” action. [malthe]
Refactored channels management view and the dedicated channel view. Big improvements to usability of the channel view. [malthe]
Added capability to embed stylesheets in outgoing mail. Right now, this is a simple text field that can be set on the channel’s composer. We’re now making use of the StoneAgeHTML library to embed styles in the individual HTML elements instead of providing styles in the <head> of the HTML document. This gives us much better support with quirky e-mail clients out there. [malthe]
In the future, we want to extend this to allow administrators to select themes for individual channels by browsing and selecting from a list of registered styles.
Added Czech translation. [naro]
Refactored mail.py to create MIMEMultipart based messages. This allows us to easily adapt the mail sending process to embed images and the like. [naro]
Added a “reference collector”. This allows you to select individual portal items to be sent out, as opposed to items collected by a Smart Folder or the like. [malthe]
Bugfixes
S&D 0.3b2 introduced an incompatible change with channels created in 0.3b1 and earlier. I added a GenericSetup upgrade step to fix this. The relevant code is in the collective.dancing.upgrade module.
If you’re using a legacy database with channels that were created before version 0.3b2, you’ll need to run this upgrade step, or you’ll see this error:
TypeError: ('object.__new__(HTMLComposer) is not safe, use persistent.Persistent.__new__()', <function _reconstructor at ...>, (<class 'collective.dancing.composer.HTMLComposer'>, <type 'object'>, None))Refer to the Upgrade section for details on how to run upgrades. [nouri]
Add metadata.xml to make QuickInstaller happy with version numbers. [naro]
Back to using checkboxes for multi selection instead of select. [nouri]
Make HTMLComposer and channel.composers persistent so that changes to template and composers are conveniently persisted. [nouri]
Use zc.lockfile to lock the queue processing (sending out of mail) instead of excessively using transaction.commit(), which caused massive ZODB bloat when a lot of messages were involved. [nouri]
Use email.Header for message header formatting. This allows for better internationalization in headers of outgoing e-mails. [naro]
In-browser preview now displays what would really be sent out, i.e. after collectors and transforms could do their thing. Before, it used to only display the context item as mail. [malthe]
Version 0.2 - 2008-05-06
Add an ‘Already subscribed?” section to the “My subscriptions” page to retrieve your password. [nouri]
added i18n:domain to browser/controlpanel-links.pt, removed extra quotes from browser/channel.py, updated pot and danish translation [bartholdy]
updated .pot and danish translation [bartholdy]
apparently triplequoted strings do not get translated .. this takes care of https://bugs.launchpad.net/singing-dancing/+bug/218448 [bartholdy]
Don’t use locale-dependent ‘string.letters’ when creating the ISalt utility. This fixes https://bugs.launchpad.net/singing-dancing/+bug/217823 [nouri]
Extended portlet with optinal footertext [bartholdy]
Added functionality to show a preview in the browser [malthe]
