By dries on

We're pleased to announce the launch of the Drupal newsletter, put together by Robin Monks. The Drupal newsletter will be a monthly publication covering the latest Drupal news. Subscribe here if you wish to receive the latest Drupal news by e-mail (or to manage your subscription). News tips or short articles can be submitted through the contact form or by contacting Robin.

Note: The first issue will be coming out May. 23rd. Any last-second articles should be in by Saturday to make this deadline. --Robin

Comments

anders.fajerson’s picture

anders.fajerson commented

Just curious: Why e-mail instead of a feed?

Thox’s picture

Thox commented

"The newsletters will be published online at drupal.org, but those who
prefer to receive the newsletter by e-mail can subscribe at
http://lists.drupal.org/listinfo/newsletter." - Dries (drupal-devel mailing list)

Hopefully this means they'll have their own feed or be part of the main feed.

dries’s picture

dries commented

Of course, the newsletter will also be published at drupal.org and will be available through RSS. We're using e-mail because a lot of people are interested in Drupal, but simply forget (or can't be bothered with) checking drupal.org once in a while. E-mail lets us push the newletter, rather than having them to pull it ...

In short: we'll let everyone use his or her tool of choice to read the newsletter. :-)

anders.fajerson’s picture

anders.fajerson commented

Thanks for clarifying :)

cantastorie’s picture

cantastorie commented

Is the newsletter integrated with Drupal in any way?
If that is the case will be published how it was done?
Thanks,
Riccardo

robin monks’s picture

robin monks commented

>>Is the newsletter integrated with Drupal in any way?
Yes, it is writen by Drupal users about Drupal.
>>If that is the case will be published how it was done?
The newsletter is writen by Drupal users, edited by me in a word processor and published via Drupal.org and mailman.

Robin

--
Robin Monks / Socials
I build teams and technology for positive change.

cantastorie’s picture

cantastorie commented

Thanks. I just wanted to know how the newsletter manager was integrated with Drupal, but now I understand it is not.
Great job anyway.
Riccardo

boris mann’s picture

boris mann commented

Are we going to use the submission queue and the "story" node type for submitting things? I had suggested this on the Drupal-Docs mailing list. I'm a little confused about the whole "sign up now and there will be content later" -- this is not how newsletters typically work in my experience: you have good, interesting content first, and then people subscribe. And for me, with web content today, that means RSS, although I do agree that it's good to give people the email option.

Don't get me wrong: I think it's a good idea, just interested in how it's going to be implemented. And really hope that it's not going to be published on Drupal.org as yet-another-book or yet-another-forum.

Also, Robin, your Drupal user profile is empty right now. Perhaps you can fill out a few details to tell us a little more about yourself.

dries’s picture

dries commented

It's perfectly valid to announce the launch of a newsletter and to allow people to subscribe regardless of the fact there has been published newsletters. Anyone can subscribe or unsubscribe at any point in time. (In a way the newsletter replaces the "Drupal quickies" I've been writing lately.)

I use my RSS reader daily, find it very convenient and recommend it to others. However, regardless of RSS' widespread adoption, it is still not as common as e-mail is and I'm afraid people are not going to install an RSS reader just to read Drupal's newsletter.

Either way, we'll provide an RSS feed for the newsletter which means they'll have their own "taxonomy term" (category) on drupal.org. For now, we'll go with the story module, a taxnomoy category and the "traditional" e-mail newsletter. Everybody should be happy, not? ;-)

Maybe at one point in time when we have a "subscribe to this category" feature, we can do away with the newsletter mailing list and manage all kinds of subscriptions through drupal.org. It would rock and I can see that happen within 3-12 months from now. However, that that doens't mean we should hold back the newsletter.

robert castelo’s picture

robert castelo commented

I've been working on an email newsletter module for quite a while:

http://www.cortextcommunications.com/development/newsletter/features

I realised that it would be more useful to break it up into various component modules - such as a content selection module, scheduling module, bounce handling module, etc.

This would allow the email component to be easily replaced with an RSS, web page, or PDF component, so each newsletter can be delivered in a variety of different ways.

I'm currently in the process of splitting up the module into component modules.

http://www.cortextcommunications.com/forum/47

John VanDyk is also working on similar functionality, but more geared towards RSS at the moment.

[MegaGrunt]

------------------------------------------
Drupal Specialists: Consulting, Development & Training

Robert Castelo, CTO
Code Positive
London, United Kingdom
----

boris mann’s picture

boris mann commented

My comments had little to do with RSS vs. email (or any tech development) -- I pointed it out, and as I said, I agree we definitely need to have both and this has nothing to do with Drupal mail integration.

I was interested in how/what modules would be used on the Drupal side of things. Great to hear that we're using the story module. Can we have categories for other things, as I suggested in the docs list? e.g. best practices, case studies, etc. The newsletter could then also draw on that material.

dries’s picture

dries commented

If we can find a good way to integrate these in the current navigation structure ...

boris mann’s picture

boris mann commented

My suggestion would be a block on the front page with a "Latest Stories" listing, or some sort of block that displays title/category/submit date.

For those that don't follow the doc list, my suggestion is for user-contributed stories. This might be case studies/success stories (currently buried 5 levels deep in the handbook here), it might be write ups of tutorials or best practices. Basically anything that is not neutral "how to" documentation and that is longer article type content.

robin monks’s picture

robin monks commented

>>Also, Robin, your Drupal user profile is empty right now. Perhaps you can
>>fill out a few details to tell us a little more about yourself.

I'm just a naturally secretive guy. I will add some details though...

Robin

--
Robin Monks / Socials
I build teams and technology for positive change.

walkah’s picture

walkah commented

that he's a canadian (resident at least). :)

--
James Walker :: http://walkah.net/

sami_k’s picture

sami_k commented

Excellent! I'm now subscribed, keep up the good work!

--
Etopian (Consulting, Development, and Hosting)
http://drupal.etopian.net

freyquency’s picture

freyquency commented

I'm an big fan of the Debian Weekly News - it manages to be interesting, quick to read, and encapsulate really busy mailing lists. From what I can see the Drupal mailing list offers to be similar to this. I don't think it needs to tightly integrate into the framework or anything... it might be overkill. Plus if people were to submit stories it would require time and effort, where it should be more of a snapshot of what's going on, even if people are too busy to formalize their efforts into a formal report.

dries’s picture

dries commented

FYI: in less than 24 hours, 160 people subscribed. Sweet.

dries’s picture

dries commented

FYI: we have 350 subscriptions now.

pamphile’s picture

pamphile commented

I always wanted to use MailMan, but how do you export large amounts of users from Mailman ? It's easy to get members to signup, but extracting large amounts of users emails is so diffucult.

http://01debug.com

netlynx’s picture

netlynx commented

I have heard great things - but I have spent 20 minutes and I still can't find it - is it not available anywhere for those that have only just signed up?
I may not have signed up earlier but I did assume it would be available SOMEWHERE when I had time to look.

If it is available somewhere then congratulations on hiding it extremely well.

...I'm only trying to appreciate your magnificent efforts!

sami_k’s picture

sami_k commented

There has been no newsletter sent out yet...

--
Etopian (Consulting, Development, and Hosting)
http://drupal.etopian.net

robin monks’s picture

robin monks commented

The newslett was sent on time, and the archive is available at http://lists.drupal.org/archives/newsletter/2005-05/msg00000.html until Dries gets it on site.

Sorry for the confusion of those who subscribed after the issue went out.

Robin Monks

--
Robin Monks / Socials
I build teams and technology for positive change.

pamphile’s picture

pamphile commented

I know the handbook explains it already, but it would be great to see articles explaining how to create modules.

http://01classifieds.com