I'm trying to make the newsletter module work with 2.4.2 - I have a patched version, where I have mainly changed HTTPRequest to SS_HTTPRequest and Database to SS_Database.

swaiba asked me here if could share my version, so I’ve attached it here. It seems to be working, but I haven’t tested it properly in a production environment. If you find any more problems (and solutions :), let me know.

Hi

I've found an issue with the newsletter module which although does'nt prevent it from working could be worth looking into particularly if the module was to be used to email a large number of people.

A few newsletters i've created through the system have become extremely chunky (in terms of file size) for relatively little content which is being caused by TinyMCE wrapping every word in a paragraph as shown below.

<span style="color: #ffffff;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #000000;">text </span></span></span>

Another issue I've run into is that images entered into the newsletter do not appear in the preview, i though this could be fixed by adding a <base tag to the email template but this caused issues once the email has been sent and is being viewed in an email client.

The version I downloaded from SVN works for 2.4, are there any more changes in 2.4.2 that makes it incompatible?

I searched through all the code and there's no references to the old stuff. Is it 0.4.0rc1 that you have patched or have you patched some other version? AFAIK all they changed for 0.4.0rc1 was the references that you've patched yourself to make it work with the 2.4 branch and the newsletter page says its compatible with 2.4.

I took the trunk version from svn to start with.

I know this is brutally unintuitive, but sometimes the trunk is not actually the latest version. For some reason one of the branches is sometimes the most updated version, in this case it's the 0.4.0rc1 that's the latest and greatest even though the module page certainly gives the impression that the trunk is the latest build. I downloaded the trunk right now just to make absolutely sure and it is older than 0.4.0rc1. Most of the code in the trunk hasn't been touched since late 2009.

If you're going to patch or make changes I suggest you use the 0.4.0rc1 as your base since that's the latest code from them.

That is indeed a bit weird. I had checked to see that trunk was the last folder that was updated on svn (september 28 2010).

Anyway, good to know that there’s a better version available. I need to build something custom, though. I want to send out everything through SMTP and to avoid the normal batch processing (and transfer it to a background process with Swift Mailer).

Doesn't the newsletter module use whatever mailer you've set up for the Email class? I've never actually modified that part of the Newsletter module, I've just modified the admin interface and what data actually gets sent to the template.

If it does use the mailer then maybe you can do your special mailing stuff there and won't have to modify the Newsletter module as much?

Btw the recent update in trunk is the CheckboxSetWithExtraField.php which is a new file I believe, everything else is from 2009. That file is also in 0.4.0rc1 so I think they just backported it to the trunk. I've no idea why the rest of the trunk is an old version.

I have it working with a custom mailer . But I was also thinking about having the actual sending take place 'in the background' instead of having the user wait for it.

The newsletter will have to support a few thousand mails and I also read that people don’t recommen the current module for that kind of volume.

Still hav to see if I can pull it off properly, though. Making this work has been rescheduled to next week though.