wagtail-birdsong 1.1.1

Create and send email campaigns from Wagtail

A plugin for wagtail that allows you to create, send, preview, edit and test email campaigns from within Wagtail. Campaign templates are created using mjml.

Tutorial - https://engineertodeveloper.com/how-to-add-an-email-newsletter-to-wagtail/

Basic usage

Install birdsong:

pip install wagtail-birdsong

Add the following to your installed apps:

'mjml',
'birdsong',
'wagtail.contrib.modeladmin',

Make a new app e.g. email, create a models.py with a model that extends the included Campaign model. Some compatible mjml streamfield blocks are included in birdsong for convenience.

from birdsong.blocks import DefaultBlocks
from birdsong.models import Campaign
from django.db import models
from wagtail.admin.edit_handlers import StreamFieldPanel
from wagtail.core.fields import StreamField


class SaleEmail(Campaign):
    body = StreamField(DefaultBlocks())

    panels = Campaign.panels + [
        StreamFieldPanel('body'),
    ]

Then in the same app, create a wagtail_hooks.py if it doesn’t exist, this is where the admin is created for content editors to create/edit/send campaigns.

The CampaignAdmin is just an extension of Wagtail’s ModelAdmin class so most of the same options are available for overriding functionality.

from wagtail.contrib.modeladmin.options import modeladmin_register
from birdsong.options import CampaignAdmin

from .models import SaleEmail


@modeladmin_register
class SaleEmailAdmin(CampaignAdmin):
    campaign = SaleEmail
    menu_label = 'Sale Email'
    menu_icon = 'mail'
    menu_order = 200

Create your campaign template in {app_folder}/templates/mail/{model_name}.html e.g. email/templates/mail/sale_email.html, alternatively override the get_template method on your campaign model.

Campaign templates use django-mjml for responsive, well designed emails. To read up how to setup django-mjml you can read the docs here. There is a base template included in Birdsong that can be extended.

sale_email.html

{% extends "birdsong/mail/base_email.html" %}

{% block email_body %}
<mj-section>
    <mj-column>
        <mj-text>Hello {{ contact.email }}!</mj-text>
        {% for b in self.body %}
            {{ b }}
        {% endfor %}
    </mj-column>
</mj-section>
{% endblock email_body %}

You’re now ready to go!

Custom Contact models

By default the included Contact model is used for every campaign, but you may want to store extra data, like names and preferences. You can override the default Contact model by setting an option on the admin for your campaign:

models.py

from birdsong.models import Contact
from django.db import models

class ExtendedContact(Contact):
    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    location = models.CharField(max_length=255)

wagtail_hooks.py

from wagtail.contrib.modeladmin.options import ModelAdmin, modeladmin_register
from birdsong.options import CampaignAdmin

from .models import ExtendedContact, SaleEmail


@modeladmin_register
class SaleEmailAdmin(CampaignAdmin):
    campaign = SaleEmail
    menu_label = 'Sale Email'
    menu_icon = 'mail'
    menu_order = 200
    contact_class = ExtendedContact


# You may want to add your own modeladmin here to list/edit/add contacts
@modeladmin_register
class ContactAdmin(ModelAdmin):
    model = ExtendedContact
    menu_label = 'Contacts'
    menu_icon = 'user'
    list_diplay = ('email', 'first_name', 'last_name', 'location')

Filtering on contact properties

You might want to only send a campaign to a subset of your Contact models. Creating a filter using django-filter and adding it to the CampaignAdmin allows users to filter on any property.

filters.py

from django_filters import FilterSet
from django_filters.filters import AllValuesFilter

from .models import ExtendedContact


class ContactFilter(FilterSet):
    location = AllValuesFilter()

    class Meta:
        model = ExtendedContact
        fields = ('location',)

wagtail_hooks.py

from wagtail.contrib.modeladmin.options import modeladmin_register
from birdsong.options import CampaignAdmin

from .filters import ContactFilter
from .models import ExtendedContact, SaleEmail


@modeladmin_register
class SaleEmailAdmin(CampaignAdmin):
    campaign = SaleEmail
    menu_label = 'Sale Email'
    menu_icon = 'mail'
    menu_order = 200
    contact_class = ExtendedContact
    contact_filter_class = ContactFilter

Users will now be able to send campaigns to a subset of contacts base on location.

Unsubscribe url

Included in birdsong is a basic way for contacts to unsubscribe, just include the url configuration and add the unsubscribe url to your email template.

urls.py

from birdsong import urls as birdsong_urls
from django.urls import include, path

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    path('mail/', include(birdsong_urls)),
    ...
]

sale_email.html

{% extends "birdsong/mail/base_email.html" %}

{% block email_body %}
<mj-section>
    <mj-column>
        <mj-text>Hello {{ contact.email }}!</mj-text>
        {% for b in self.body %}
            {{ b }}
        {% endfor %}
    </mj-column>
</mj-section>
<mj-section>
    <mj-column>
        <mj-text align="center">
            Click <a href="{{ site.full_url }}{% url 'birdsong:unsubscribe' contact.id %}">here</a> to unsubscribe.
        </mj-text>
    </mj-column>
</mj-section>
{% endblock email_body %}

Future features:

• More tests!

• Proper docs

• Backends other thans SMTP for sending emails so analytics can be gathered (email opened, bounced etc)

• Reloading the preview on edit

• Broader permissions for campaigns (send, preview, test send)