How to send a newsletter

Posted by Bernard on Nov. 29 2004, (popular)
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In this tutorial we will show you how simple it is to list most recent articles and to make an e-mail out of it.

You need a live demonstration, don't you? Ok, then look at this corporate intranet web site.

This site is dedicated to network stuff, and has about one hundred registered users. The purpose of the newsletter is to keep in touch with all this staff, that is scattered across the world.

One or two times per month, we have to list digests of most recent published articles, and to send an e-mail to all registered users.

As shown below, YACS makes this quite simple.

YACS lists excerpts of recent articles

Everything starts at the control panel, as usual. We select the Letters module from the side panel.

YACS provides an index of previous letters. We can ensure that the time has come to send a new newsletter. Also, we can view the previous newsletter and note the id of the last referenced article. Then we ask YACS to create a newsletter, from the page menu below the page title.

YACS offers a straightforward form to edit the message that will be sent to community members. More importantly, it populates the field with excerpts from the most recent articles. Of course, prefix and suffix text can be modified in a dedicated configuration panel according to your needs. At the bottom of the page we can select the target for the message. If you need to send this to only one address, you can do it as well.

YACS send the newsletter by e-mail

When we submit data to YACS it will process every recipient in sequence. Please note that YACS has a very straightforward policy to wait for one second between each e-mail. If your site has a large number of members, this means that your browser will stay waiting for a while... Don't worry, it is just that YACS is doing a lot on your behalf...

YACS builds the archive

YACS also make an article out of the e-mail message for archiving purpose. Therefore the new entry in the newsletter section.

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