I provided quite a few customers with a simplenews solution for sending email newsletters until now.
All of them, none excluded, are having trouble to click the right thing for making a new "newsletter issue". They all click "add newsletter" in the admin section of simplenews instead of "add newsletter issue", not because I told them so, but because this seems to be intuitive. And I agree, adding a "newsletter" looks a lot like.. well... adding a newsletter!

I'm not sure how to fix this, but this is a usability issue to me. Maybe we should call the simplenews letters "newsletter category" and the newsletter nodes "newsletter"? There must be a better way. How do comparable solutions call this stuff?

Perhaps usefull:
All projects are translated in Dutch to "nieuwsbrief" and "nieuwsbrief uitgave", maybe this is even more confusing?
Most clients are sending newsletters just twice a year, that's not enough to learn something that is counter intuitive.

Comments

sutharsan’s picture

sutharsan commented

I agree with you, it is in fact one of my oldest comments on Simplenews even before I was a maintainer. Please post you solution in the form of a patch.

keesje’s picture

keesje commented

OK.

I would like to raise some discussion on this what exactly would be the best solution.
Mine would be: Maybe we should call the simplenews letters "newsletter category" and the newsletter nodes "newsletter".
this would be better than it is now, at least to me, but I'm not completely satisfied. Maybe someone has a better idea?

Thanks,

Kees

rsevero’s picture

rsevero commented

I don't have better suggestions.

I think kees@qrios suggestions are much better than the current ones.

sutharsan’s picture

sutharsan commented
Version: 6.x-1.x-dev » 7.x-1.x-dev
Category: feature » task

In simplenews D7 I'm working on I follow this proposal. I'll keep this issue open for possible discussion.

pillarsdotnet’s picture

pillarsdotnet commented

Titles and descriptions:

Newsletter List
A group of Newsletter Pages and Newsletter Subscriptions.
Newsletter Page
A content item associated with a Newsletter List and optionally sent to its Newsletter Subscribers.
Newsletter Subscriber
An email address with at least one Newsletter Subscription.
Newsletter Subscription
The association of a Newsletter Subscriber with a Newsletter List.
miro_dietiker’s picture

miro_dietiker
Location Switzerland
commented

The name "news" seems to clash with many things i can imagine...
While newsletter is a clear term to be associated with email news publishing, news is not to me.

pillarsdotnet’s picture

pillarsdotnet commented

Revised #5 according to #6 above.

pillarsdotnet’s picture

pillarsdotnet commented

The following is probably better for namespace reasons, even though I like the sound of #5 better:

Simplenews List
A group of Simplenews Pages and Simplenews Subscriptions.
Simplenews Page
A content item associated with a Simplenews List and optionally sent to its Simplenews Subscribers.
Simplenews Subscriber
An email address with at least one Simplenews Subscription.
Simplenews Subscription
The association of a Simplenews Subscriber with a Simplenews List.
berdir’s picture

berdir
Primary language German
Location Switzerland
commented

I certainly prefer #5 over #8. Simplenews is the technical project name and nothing users need to see or understand.
I don't think the namespace is an issue here, Simpletest uses Testing, Privatemsg uses "Private message", Userpoints usually just "Points" (that can be branded anyway).

I'm also not that convinced about List/Page. The original 7.x-1.x release node at http://drupal.org/node/95628 talks about "Newsletter" and "Newsletter category".

Looking at wikipedia, the definition of "Newsletter" is:

A newsletter is a regularly distributed publication generally about one main topic that is of interest to its subscribers.

Doesn't really help ;)

That said, I'm pretty sure that we want to keep using "Newsletter" in public facing UI strings. Because you sign up to a newsletter, not a Newsletter list or even newsletter category.

Given that, it would be at least as confusing IMHO if a Newsletter in the frontend is suddenly a Newsletter category/list in the backend. So I actually quite like "Newsletter" and "Newsletter issue" but I'm sure the current UI needs to be made more consistent. And since we're currently moving the Newsletter (category) configuration from Structure to Configuration in a different issue, it will be out of the way for most users.

Because if you don't want to explain your users the difference between a "newsletter issue" and a "newsletter", just don't give them access to mess with the newsletter configuration.

miro_dietiker’s picture

miro_dietiker
Location Switzerland
commented

Referring as a clean link to the related discussion:
#1245286: Generalize Simplenews to more use cases.

miro_dietiker’s picture

miro_dietiker
Location Switzerland
commented
Status: Active » Fixed

The current 7.x release was cleaned up with naming conventions.
Key concepts are:
Newsletter
Newsletter Issue
Subscriber
Subsctiption

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.