vBNewsletters
 

Hey all,

What is vBNewsletters?

It is a simple modification that adds a massive addition to your community! It gives you the ability to add a newsletter to your forum. It not only adds more features to your bulletin board, but can also help boost your member base as many forums find that members enjoy reading the happenings via newsletters.

Features

* Newsletter Page Added - ?do=newsletter
* Newsletter Switch Added
* Newsletter Title and Content Added
* Newsletter Release Date Function Added
* Newsletter Navbar Phrase Added
* HTML Ready
* Version Check Added (vBulletin Version 3.6)

Included in Modification...

* 1 Product
* 1 Template
* 1 Phrase
* 1 Plugin

Support

Support will be given at vBDiscussion.com and in this thread :)

Installation

Installation takes minutes as the product file does every thing apart from one small template modification which is to place the Newsletter link into your navbar! (This template modification is unneccesary if you have Menu Control installed!)

Thanks,

Marky

Does this email users by any chance?

No I didn't include that because you could do it just as easily by manually emailing all your users from the Admin CP :)

I'm confused. So, what exactly does this add-on do?

Theres your answer ^^

BAH! I thought it emails the users with an HTML newsletter. Thats what I really want. I was so stoked for a minute.

Marky, I read that. Obviously your description isn't very clear…

I just looked up the word "newsletter"You say it isn't mailed out? Does it even generate a newsletter, or are we writing the whole thing out ourselves? Is it simply an interface that spits out to the public some variable strings we input?

Again, what does this do?

The screenshots say more but the main features is that the modification creates a page on your forum (?do=newsletter) and you can then write your newsletter on there and release it periodically like you say. You could if you wish then email out a notice that your newsletter has been released. It's all HTML ready so it's just as good as emailing a HTML newsletter :)

Is availability or access limited by usergroup?

I was hoping on a mailing out feature and that people could subscribe and unsubscribe. Such a hack would get my vote lol :-)

If this included an option to subscribe for forum members and the ability to send out the newsletter via email, it would be an interesting and useful add-on. As it is, the point of installing it escapes me, frankly.

Use Psionic Vision's HTML E-Mail Hack. ;)

Any chance on a 3.5.4 version of this?

Very Nice. I love the idea.

I was wondering why doesnt it say
Viewing Newsletter
when your viewing who's online?
Is there a way to change this so it does?

People are just too cynical these days, Marky. I personally think it's a great idea for those that do not want to install a portal. Announcements just don't cut it either - They get read less often than normal posts on my forum. A newsletter is a great idea, especially if you have some sort of alert when a new issue is released. I can code that myself, though it would be a handy addition to this addon.

All in all, I'd give you a 5/5 on this one. Great work.

Mmm... the title is really confusing imho ... I also expected a HTML based Mail newsletter .

Not bad, but if you included some more features then it would appeal to heaps more people.

some suggestions.

1. give us the option to email this newsletter out to selected usergroups.
2. allow people to submit topics to the newsletter so we can include that in the final posting of the newsletter.
3. Have an archive of old newsletters that have been sent out.
4. forgot this idea, will post it when i remember ^^ lol.

I'm all for that one :)
I dont agree about it being sent out, that can be done in admincp as said, Its just people being too lazy to do it :D

Oh dear god. Thanks a lot for this! :D

I was just about to suggest an archive to view previous newsletters, but I see I've been beaten to it ;)

Also like the "viewing page" idea suggested earlier.

Yeah im one of those lazy people ^^ and it would make this mod complete if it did lol, it can at least be an option.

here is more idea on extending the idea of sending it out.

Have a cron job or something that will send it out on x day of the week/month/year etc.

Have a default template to start with for the newsletter. One that wont change each month unless we change it.

Then have the option of accepting or declining peoples contributions to the newsletter (an idea from before I had where people can try and get articles etc submitted into the newsletter, where they write out a something good, then in the newsletter it may have the first paragraph then say full article here...)


how cool would this be ^^

Will arrive soon enough ;)

That is because I didnt think of the idea whilst making it :)
I'll stuff it in there next update :)

Thank you very much Kaezul, your support is greatly appreciated :)
Do you have any idea on what kind of alert to give when a new issue is released?

Im all ears on a new title but I like vBNewsletters :)

Thank you for the suggestions, I do definatly plan on releasing updates on this modification. I did only plan to include simple features for the first version, that way it can grow as the updates keep arriving :)

---

Thanks for all the suggestions guys :)
And hope you enjoy it ^^

Very good hack/idea Marky. Would be complete with Archive from old ones. :)

Hello,

I too found the thread title to be misleading. Newsletters, by definition and online example, are "sent" out as a means to draw users back in. This doesn't send anything out. This requires the users to already be active on the site. This is more of a "Site Update" type of modification.

I am not knocking it btw. I think it is a great idea for users that can use it. I too believe this would be great with an archive, but I would also suggest a mailing option. Without the mailing option, this will never be a news"letter".

lol i found it to be confusing as well. i thought it was going to be like the newsletter I get from one of the vb community sites that just lists some recent and popular dicussion threads as well as statistical updates.

:-)

Honestly I still don't get it. Where does this 'newsletter' actually appear? Why not just add a sticky to a board or post your newsletters in a seperate board and link to that forum from the navbar?

Hello,

I was just checking in on this to see if there 3was any new info and something occured to me. Couldn't you do this EXACT same thing with a private forum? (Could even name the forum "Newsletter")

If the forum were set to private, with only admins being able to post, and HTML activated....you could create the same thing and it would be archived right from the beginning.

Users could then subscribe to that forum and get the newsletter in their mail too! :D

yup, i agree. it needs to be mailable! thats why i downloaded it because i thought you could mail out the newsletter (like commbull does).

any chance of adding RSS support to this news letter?

For those of you that want to have an Archive of news letters using this same concept you could use the WebTemplates 3.5.x: VB Integrated CMS (Content Management System) Just make a new page for yur News Letter call it Letter1 etc.. make another page that would have a link to each one... I have just started doing a How Too on my site using the WebTemplates 3.5.x: VB Integrated CMS (Content Management System). You can set permissions for each page by usergroup if you like.

FYI, to avoid any kind of future confusion, you may want to annotate that dependent on whether or not a member has altered their index.php file (if they are using a CMS such as vbadvanced and have renamed their index.php file to something else) that they will need to use the renamed index.php file in the link.

For example... [as per Step 2]
If Joe Doe's index.php file was renamed to forums.php, then their link would work as such:

I think there is demand for one...

There is one. CommBull has been upgraded but is no longer free... I believe it was $10 or $12 USD... see http://www.octanedev.com/

Ok, this is probably sitting right under my nose but where do you find the Menu Control option?

TIA!

There was a really cool newsletter for PostNuke where you would tell it to pull certain threads from the forums (by thread and by forum), add some special paragraphs, graphics and such and the system would email to all who had the option enabled in their usercp. It came with configurable headers for each area in the newsletter like "latest posts since last newsletter", "latest private messages since you were at the site" etc etc

For the most part it was pretty automatic and a real boon for my visitor counts and is one of the major things I miss about my old site before I migrated to vB.

I know it would be a huge undertaking but I hope it's something you'd consider for vB :)

It's not a huge undertaking - Combull already does all those things.

No, it isn't.

It really isn't.

XHTML error in the template newsletter_main:

must be:

and you have wrong </if> in the same template

also the hack isn't fully phrased

Uncached templates: newsletter_main (1)

When I saw the name of this thread, I thought this was going to be like Post-Nuke's pn-Tres-Mailer Mod, which I got to use for a while when I had a Post Nuke board. I would really like something like that converted over into vBulletin. And I am sure I am not alone in wanting something like that in which we wouldn't have to pay for, because pn-Tres-Mailer was and still is free. (Don't even mention Combull; it's a paid product now.)

The current Add-on of vBNewsletters seems okay, but is not quite right for what I had in mind. I would rather have pn-Tres-Mailer, except it doesn't work on vBulletin.