Hemres

Newsletters for the Jonge Democraten.

Installation notes

Depends on Mezzanine (optional) for TinyMCE.

Requires Janeus for LDAP integration.

Settings in settings.py:

• HEMRES_DONT_EMAIL
  set to True to not actually send any email from the Hemres app.
• HEMRES_FROM_ADDRESS
  set to the "From" email address for all messages, typically a noreply email address

Subscription management

Via the root page / a user can enter their email address and receive an automatically generated email which contains one link to manage the email-bound subscriptions and one link for each LDAP user that is associated with that exact email address to manage the subscriptions associated with that LDAP user.

Users subscribe to mailing lists.

Mailing lists have extra options. Certain LDAP groups can be automatically subscribed to certain mailing lists. Also, LDAP group membership can be required for certain mailing lists.

Templates, files and newsletters

Hemres stores mailing templates, mailing files and newsletters. Newsletters are created as a clone of a template, and have no link to the template after creation.

Template have fields template (HTML template), title (to identify it) and zero or more files. The HTML template is a Django template that supports the tags {{subscriptions_url}} (absolute URL to subscriptions page), {{subject}} (subject of the newsletter), {{name}} (name of the recipient), {{content}} (the rendered content to be embedded in the template) and {{filelist}}, which will be rendered to an unordered list of attachments when viewing the online version of the newsletter.

Newsletters have the same fields as templates, with additional fields subject , content. date (date of the newsletter) and public (whether a newsletter can be viewed online). The field content contains HTML text, with only a subset of HTML whitelisted. The whitelisted tags are 'a', 'b', 'code', 'em', 'h1', 'h2', 'h3', 'i', 'img', 'strong', 'ul', 'ol', 'li', 'p', 'br', 'span', 'table', 'tbody', 'tr', 'td', 'thead', 'div', 'span'. The whitelisted attributes are 'class' and 'style' on all HTML tags, 'href' and 'target' on hyperlinks and 'src' and 'alt' on images.

Mailing files are images (that are embedded in the emails) and attachments. There can also be files that are not attached, but that are linked to from the newsletter.

Mailing files are included in newsletters in several ways:

1. Images are embedded using {% emailimage 'identifier' %}. Images should not have the "attach to email" checkbox checked.
2. Files that should be attached should have the "attach to email" checkbox checked (in the mailing template or the newsletter admin).
3. Files that should not be attached but linked to from the email can be linked to using {% emailfile 'identifier' %}.
4. For the content field of the newsletter only, the string str="{{identifier}}" will be automatically replaced by embedded images and href="{{identifier}}" will be automatically replaced by file links. When using the TinyMCE editor, this means that the image source {{identifier}} or the hyperlink URL {{identifier}} will be replaced by the embedded image or by a hyperlink to the file on the server.

Newsletter workflow

First, mailing templates must be defined. They may require mailing files, for example as embedded images in the style.

Then, a newsletter is created based on a mailing template. This is done by clicking the link "Create newsletter" from the list of mailing templates. The full template is copied by the system. The newsletter subject and content are defined by the user. Additional attachments are added to the newsletter. Also, the user may add files that remain on the server and are linked to from the content.

In the newsletter, there is still a separation of the template and the newsletter itself. The idea here is that the newsletter content is sent by a content manager, while the template is created by a designer or by someone who has experience with HTML.

From the page in the admin that lists all newsletters, the user has several options. They can view the newsletter in the browser. They can send a test email to a supplied email address. They can also send the email to a list.

Sending the email to a list has the effect that a "Newsletter To List" object is created. The idea is that a supervisor or administrator can check the newsletter before sending it to the subscribers.

From the admin page that lists the "Newsletter To List" objects, an administrator send the email to the subscribers. This creates a "Newsletter To Subscriber" object for each subscriber.

Finally, each "Newsletter To Subscriber" object is processed either automatically or manually (from the admin page). The newsletter is rendered and sent to that subscriber and the "Newsletter To Subscriber" object is removed from the database.

For developers

To quickly get started, use build_env.sh to create an environment. Then copy in nieuws the file settings.py.dist to settings.py. Edit this file. Update the SECRET_KEY. The rest is optional. By default, no emails are actually sent and if the Janeus options are not configured, there will not be a LDAP bridge.