Background

This is the second episode in the “Newsletters in Drupal” mini-series, and I’m really excited for this show! We’re actually going to be talking about two modules, and the reason I’m excited is because there’s potential for these two modules to merge into one. We all know that there are a million ways to do any one thing in Drupal, and from a site-builder, and maintenance point of view, it’s always a good thing if we can eliminate duplicate modules! So, while nothing’s set in stone yet, this might just be the beginning of the end for at least one redundant module!

Alright, before we get into the modules themselves, I’m going to be asking all of the guests in this series the same two questions about newsletters in Drupal.

• What do you see as a benefit of using a “Drupal” setup like Simplenews or Newsletter over an external service like MailChimp?
  • Sascha:
    • Everything happens in Drupal, Full control over the data, user interface and processes. Simplenews allows you create personalized newsletters based on the context of the user, using other data from your site. For example, you could add the list of content they flagged last month or suggestions based on that.
  • Paris:
    • Better integration of your drupal data with the newsletter system.
    • You can use other existing modules to improve the creation or automatic population of your newsletter.
    • Central place for its administration.
    • It is open source, so you can easily modify it further according to your needs, or hire someone to build another custom module on top of it.
    • Of course, it is free
• And for the sake of argument, what might you see as the benefit of using an external service as opposed to a “Drupal” specific setup?
  • Sascha:
    • A large number of features that are ready to use and better backend user iinterfaces like templates and template builders. We are currently working on integrating with Panelizer, so that you can use similar tools as well in Simplenews but we don’t have nearly as much time as the teams behind these services to provide the same experience.
    • Scalability, being able to send tens of thousands of e-mails in short time. You can of course use a transactional e-mail service like Mendrill or Mailjet for reliability, statistics and so on but the e-mails are still built on your site.
  • Paris:
    • You dont have to think about server configuration, mail servers, spam mails, blacklisting and other technical things.
    • Your server load, since the whole system is hosted elsewhere
    • Maturity: i think most external services are more mature than simplenews and of course a lot more than newsletter

Simplenews

• What is simplenews, and how does it work?
• What are some of the features?
  • Sending nodes as newsletters to subscribers
  • Multiple newsletter categories with separate settings
  • Per category and multi-signup Blocks and Pages
  • Subscriber management including mass-subscription and export
  • Optional E-mail confirmations for anonymous users
  • Customizable newsletter templates
  • Support for HTML (including text alternative) newsletter when used in combination with a supported mail system module
  • Views and Rules integration
  • Support for multi-language newsletters
• What is the documentation like? Are there screencasts?
  • There is some documentation on drupal.org but it is outdated.
  • There is the screencast from Modules Unraveled

Newsletter

• What sets Newsletter apart from Simplenews? How is it different?
  • Newsletter was built with automated newsletters in mind..That is, you have many newsletter lists and want to send them with different time intervals each..I know that there is an add-on module for simplenews that does that, but it came a lot later than newsletter was released
  • It also has easier workflow for admins and statistics (Same as above, there is a simplenews module for that
  • Finally it is base on Drupal 7 entities, which makes it easier to integrate with other entity based modules.
• What are some of the features?
  • Multiple newsletters lists configurable on existing terms
  • Plain text or HTML out of the box.
  • Multiple schedules Each newsletter can have more than one schedule, e.g. Daily, Monthly, Weekly, manually or even custom, eg after 10 new posts for this term.
  • Centralized administration and configuration on a single page.
  • Users can customize the terms in the list they subscribe to.
  • Custom template per list.
  • Statistics (CTR and Open-Rate)
• What is the documentation like? Are there screencasts?
  • Unfortunately not..all documentation there is, is in README.txt

Use Cases

• When would someone use one module over the other?
  • Sascha:
    • I had only a quick look at Newsletter today but from what I saw, it has more functionality for administrators and is probably also easier to use out of the box than Simplenews. I think it is a typical project that has been built for a specific use case and if that use case is what you are looking for, then newsletter might be a good match for you.
    • Simplenews has evolved over a long time and has some of advantages due to that
    • A reliable spooling system that makes sure that mails are sent and are only sent once, including support for large numbers of subscribers and parallel send processes
    • A more flexible sign-up process which can be configured per newsletter category, configurable confirmation mails, combined confirmations for multiple categories and so on
    • The fact that newsletters are nodes makes it easy to provide an online archive and a web-version of your newsletter
    • Uses Drupal’s theming system to build the outgoing mails.
    • So if those things sound like something you want or need, then you should probably have a look at Simplenews
  • Paris:
    • Agreed with above, don’t have anything to add

What does the future hold?

• Can we expect to see the modules merge in the near future?
  • Sascha:
    • Depends on what you understand from a merge. A number of additional features provided by Newsletter (statistics, scheduling) is already available as separate projects. The new major version for Simplenews, which we are currently working on, will contain an improved architecture based on entities, similar to Newsletter. That should make it possible to provide the remaining additional functionality that Newsletter provides on top of Simplenews, for example the simple and straightforward of for creating and re-using templates. So once we are there, then we can probably state that Newsletter is deprecated for most usage in favor of Simplenews
  • Paris:
    • Newsletter will just provide a migrate class to transfer all the data to simplenews equivalent and of course requiring as dependencies simplenews add-on modules (like simplenews_statistics)
• What are the goals and features developed in for Simplenews 7.x-2.x?
  • Sascha:
    • New underlying, entity-based architecture
    • Clean terminology in the UI and code: newsletters, subscribers, newsletter issues
    • Recipient handlers, allowing to address a subset of your subscribers based on views, organic groups, per language, a CRM