Personlized Newsletter (second)

Hi there,

I just came across a possibility to use any user-relevant data inside a personlized newsletter. My situation was as follows:

I needed a newsletter that changed its contents based on the interests of the user. The admin would have to create just one newsletter and assign the relevant topics to the different content snippets. After doing lots of research and puzzling myself, I finally found a solution. I made a tiny modification to simplenews_mail_mail():

function simplenews_mail_mail($nid, $vid, $mail, $key = 'node') {
  // Get subscription data for recipient and language
  global $simplenews_account; // This line
  
  $account = new stdClass();
  $account->mail = $mail;
  $subscription = simplenews_get_subscription($account);
  
  $simplenews_account=$subscription; // And this one also.

Now I'm able to use $simplenews_account in my simplenews-newsletter-body.tpl.php. By making a manual database query I fetch the user and profile data from the email carried in $simplenews_account->mail. The code looks like this:

global $simplenews_account;

$result = db_query("SELECT uid FROM {users} WHERE mail = '%s' LIMIT 1", $simplenews_account->mail);
$field = db_fetch_object($result);

$recipient = user_load(array('uid'=>$field->uid));
profile_load_profile($recipient);

From this point on I'm able to use the complete user profile in $recipient.

But... there's an incredible important problem with this solution: Because of the template caching only one single email could be sent during a cron run. I set mine to run every single minute, and it's okay for my needs. So, if you have loads of subscribers, prepare to wait serveral ages for transport the newsletter to all recipients ;)

What I do is disguising the full registration as a subscription to the newsletter. I'm not sure if it'll be a good idea just to store some values in the database. Remember that you need to give the subsciptors a possibility to unsubscribe or alter personal informations, such as name or email-adress.

I think the drupal user role system is flexible enough to restrict user accounts to this functionality only.

Just a quick thought, maybe someone else likes to comment on that as well.

#127178: Make Subscribers fieldable is the current issue for such matter.