Refinery CMS Newsletters

Simple newsletters engine for Refinery CMS from webnow. It is based on the refinerycms-newsletters engine by paxer (http://github.com/paxer/refinerycms-newsletters).

Features

1. HTML newsletter campaigns

2. Newsletter subscribers are not system users. The subscribers are stored in a dedicated table and can be managed in the refinerycms admin section separately.

3. Newsletters are send out as HTML emails:

   • rendered as raw HTML, so all features of the HTML Editor are supported (In case you include customs styles as classes, add them to the style section in the mailer template's header)
   • relative image paths are converted to remote HTML calls to the server, you can include images into your HTML newsletters

4. simple statistics

5. double-opt-in subscription using an activation email including a personalized security token

6. one-click un-subscription using the personal security token

Refinery CMS Newsletters supports Rails 3.0.x (tested on 3.1.10)

Requirements

1. Refinery CMS version 1.0.x or above, tested with refinerycms 1.0.8.

2. the HAML gem since some views are in haml.

Installation

Edit your Gemfile and add the following lines at the bottom of the file:

gem 'refinerycms-newsletters', '~>1.0', ':git => 'git://github.com/helmerj/refinerycms-newsletters.git'
gem 'haml'

or clone the engine in your Rails.root/vendor/engine directory:

git clone git://github.com/helmerj/refinerycms-newsletters.git

and add the following lines to the bottom of your Gemfile instead:

gem 'refinerycms-newsletters', '~>1.0', :path => 'vendor/engines'
gem 'haml'

After including the new engine and the haml gem, run bundle install

In order to install the newsletters plugin into your existing refinerycms application run:

rails generate refinerycms_newsletters

Last but not least migrate your database:

rake db:migrate

This will create all the necessary tables and initial refinerycms pages in English and German.

Edit the "Newsletter Return Email Address" in der admin > Settings section to change the default email address which is used to initialize the return email address used in the create newsletter form.

Use

To subscribe to the newsletter service, link to the sign-up form:

/newsletter_subscription

Users will have to click the activation link provided to them in the email. The security token in the link will authorize the subscriber and activate the subscription.

User can unsubscribe using the following link which you could include in every newsletter:

unsubscribe_newsletter_subscription(@subscriber.token)

where token is the subscribers personal security token

Enjoy

NOTES:

The engine does not use a background mailing system so it most likely will have difficulties coping with larger numbers of subscribers (untested). Use a local sendmail installation on your production server, or out-source the sending of newsletter to a background service.

##TODO:

• add some basic content for new pages

• add unsubscribe form to allow users to provide their email address for un-subscription.

• add rspec tests