Has anyone used Percussion CMS to generate e-mail newsletters. Is there a way to publish to your desktop or have a prompt to decide where to publish? We need to have these files created in the CMS, generated as html and then to upload to our mass e-mail vendor site. Anyone done this before?
We generate e-mail newsletters all the time. Basically the user generates their newsletter using a specific content type (Newsletter). The content type just contains a slot that the user can insert snippets of content. There is a text box as wel for the user to type in some messages as well. Once the item is ready, they run a Publish Now on the item which publishes the newsletter to the same location on the web server (i.e. wwwroot/newsletter.html). Our mass mailing program is set to go to that location and grab the content from the page and generates the final copy to be mailed out. The newsletter is also set to expire after a few hours, just so its not sitting around on the web server.
I’ve seen other vendor software with the ability to grab external content to generate newsletters so I would check with your vendor and see if their software can grab external content like that. You could also have the newsletter get published to a different location that the end-user has access to and grab the HTML from there.
Hope that helps.
Shane
Thanks Shane, We are planning on publishing this content type to a folder where certain people can grab the html to upload into our e-mail client. Have you set-up an edition that only publishes this content type before?
Since we were fine with our newsletter being published to the website, I never had a separate edition for just this content type. Instead I have a location scheme that specifies where and how this content type is published out. What was more important for me was to ensure that the newsletter expired before the next edition of that same newsletter, otherwise one would always overwrite the other during publishing since I have them publish out to the same name.