Ext/Direct mail

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Contents

Introduction

Advanced Direct Mail/Newsletter mailer system with sophisticated options for personalization of emails including response statistics.

You can also install Direct Mail by following this tutorial made by Marlies Cohen or download her Direct Mail Tutorial from Typo3.org.

Newsletter vs Direct mail

A newsletter is basically a regular TYPO3 page which resides here in the direct mail module. You can view the page in a browser and the point is that this page is finally send as a direct mail.

A direct mail is a record that contains a compiled version of either a newsletter page or alternatively the content of an external url. In addition the direct mail contains information like the mail subject, any attachments, priority settings, reply addresses and all that. For each direct mail a log is kept of who has received the direct mail and if they responded to it.

DirectMail and TemplaVoila

DirectMail will work with TemplaVoila, but making and editing newsletters can not be done via the DirectMail module. Instead you create and edit a newletter in the same way as you make a new page inside the DirectMail SysFolder.

Two parts of the extension

This extension only give you one part of the newsletter/direct mail concept. If you also would like your visitors/users to be able to subscribe to newsletters and maintain their accounts, you also have to install:

TypoScript reference

TypoScript properties for the plugin.alt.plaintext static template used in the "media/scripts/plaintextLib.inc" file.

header

Property:

Data type:

Description:

Default:

1
2
3
4
5

->header types

You can define the five first headers for plaintext output. See table below for details.

defaultType

Int

1

date

Date

Date format.

D-m-Y

datePrefix

String

Text to put before the date:

Example:
Todays date is 25-02-98

|Date: |

linkPrefix

String

| - Headerlink: |

header types

Property:

Data type:

Description:

Default:

preBlanks
postBlanks

Int

preLineChar
postLineChar

String

preLineLen
postLineLen

Int

preLineBlanks
postLineBlanks

prefix

String to put right before the header.

Example:
>>>HEADER

autonumber

Boolean

bullet list

Property:

Data type:

Description:

Default:

bullet

String

Type of bullet to use for the list.

1: *, 2: #, 3: -

blanks

Int

How many blanks rows to follow each bullet "row"

secondRow

String

Example

If you put this into Setup:

# Settings to format plaintext mails in DirecMail extension
# H1
lib.alt_plaintext.renderObj.header.1.preLineBlanks >
lib.alt_plaintext.renderObj.header.1.preLineLen = 60
lib.alt_plaintext.renderObj.header.1.postLineLen = 60
lib.alt_plaintext.renderObj.header.1.stdWrap.noTrimWrap = | ||

looks something like this:

------------------------------------------------------------
 TEST HEADER LEVEL 1
------------------------------------------------------------

And this:

#H2
lib.alt_plaintext.renderObj.header.2.preLineLen >
lib.alt_plaintext.renderObj.header.2.postLineLen >
lib.alt_plaintext.renderObj.header.2.postLineChar >
lib.alt_plaintext.renderObj.header.2.preLineBlanks = 1
lib.alt_plaintext.renderObj.header.2.preLineChar >
lib.alt_plaintext.renderObj.header.2.stdWrap.noTrimWrap = |-- ||

looks like:

-- TEST HEADER 2

And finally all bullet list gets a blank row below each item (only to render them nicer)

# Bullet list 1
lib.alt_plaintext.renderObj.bulletlist.0.blanks = 1
lib.alt_plaintext.renderObj.bulletlist.1.blanks = 1
lib.alt_plaintext.renderObj.bulletlist.2.blanks = 1

like this:

*  Curabitur nunc ipsum, fermentum in faucibus.

*  Curabitur sem odio, tincidunt quis.

*  Curabitur tellus justo, convallis fringilla.

Troubles and Solutions

A user had to hack the $this->urlbase = ....; line because it was mis-calculating the actual urlbase. If it barfs when you 'fetch maildata' then pay attention to the url it was trying.

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