How to Use the Simplenews Module in Drupal

This class covers sending newsletters directly from your Drupal site, using the Simplenews module.Here's an overview of what you'll do in this Simplenews class:

1. Install and enable the Simplenews and administration menu modules.



2. Set some defaults to use when creating newsletters, set an address to use for test newsletters and set the default "from name" and email address.



3. Tell Simplenews what to do with a newsletter subscription when a user account is blocked or disabled, we will configure the subscribe and unsubscribe email text and we will decide where to send a user after they subscribe or unsubscribe from a newsletter.



4. Decide whether or not to use cron to send newsletters, as well as how many should be sent on each cron run.



5. Configure the newsletter category that is automatically created when we install the Simplenews module.



6. Create our first newsletter.



7. Send our first test newsletter.



8. Display the subscription blocks so that users can subscribe to our newsletter.



9. Create another newsletter category and explore the differences involved with having more than one newsletter on our site.



10. Configure the user permissions so that anonymous and authenticated users can subscribe to our newsletter.



11. Explore the ways we can add, remove, import and export users to and from our newsletter lists.



12. Send out the real newsletter.



13. Explore the two ways of handling HTML links in plain text newsletters.



14. Start sending our newsletters as HTML.



15. Install the necessary modules to make our newsletters look like HTML.



16. Install a WYSIWYG editor so that we can include links, images, and other HTML code without having to actually know HTML.



17. Install the modules required in order to apply a theme to our newsletters.



18. Apply a theme to our newsletters.



19. Create a theme to use for our newsletters.

I got back into Drupal about a year before Drupal 7 was released, so I built a couple of sites in Drupal 6. Then in January I completely switched over to D7 when it was released. Because I decided to make the switch right away, I was running into a lot of bugs/issues that hadn't been resolved yet. So, I started to make videos helping other people with the problems I found.

With the videos I made, I realized that I had shown some solutions, but people still had a lot of questions about edge cases. That was when I saw the light, and had the idea to put together series of short videos covering different topics. This format allowed me go in-depth with each module. I'm glad to be sharing these videos on OSTraining!