Any one have any more common sense suggestions:
I have a website that has been running for a while, and once a week subsubscribers are sent an email newsletter, the content of which is a specific node type, made up of a series of EVA (Entity Views Attachment) views. These EVA views take the most recent x nbr of posts from different categories with differing filters. All working well.
But the nature of the newsletter is that the node does not "snapshot" content, it just presents the last news at the point in time it is emailed to the subscription list.
We now want to ALSO capture that newsletter as a PDF, and save it to the website as an archive.
I thought I had the components I need in EVA and Views_PDF module.
I have Views_pdf rendering a PDF of test content via rules. But Views_PDF only supports showing fields - not nodes (and therefore not EVA embedded nodes). So I dont think I can combine the awesome power of EVA and Views_PDF to create the PDF newsletter.
I'm now going back to see if I can use "Print" module to create a PDF of the node (as sent via email) via rules...
I haven't had much sleep for a few days - so voice in my head is saying I'm making this more difficult than it needs to be...
What would others use to to a create a newsletter that gets emailed as HTML, AND gets archived as PDF?
Cheers
Comments
simple sideways solution
i actually use a very simple solution
using outlook i subscribe to the rss feed of my own site - and then i forward the rss feed of the posts i write (newsletters) that my subscribers want, as an HTML email to the mailing list. Easy. If i wanted to save a PDF a copy and paste of the pre formatted content into word and saving as a PDF would work ideally
thats a very simple few clicks process with nothing to install!
Good suggestion
Got me thinking, I might see if there is a way to automate via RSS...
The key challenge I have is the existing eNewsletter "node" is dynamic (made of EVA views)... Maybe if I work out how to automatically spawn a new node based on the e-Newsletter node each time it is sent...
One of my challenges is that I really need to have a fully automatic solution, as the "administrators" of this site are ... well... "technically challenged". Ie: Struggle to turn on a kettle. And even if it was just one click, I cant rely on them to do it.
That may sound like I'm overstating it... I'm not:
3 weeks ago I had to give a 1 hr workshop on how to cut and paste. Seriously - just cut and paste. And one of them still didn't get it.
Jason Brooks
Lab4 Web Design
Lara, Victoria, Australia.
lol i relate
ive had to explain the right mouse function before...
views can have rss feeds - so that part can be automated. you could setup a rule in outlook to automate the rss feed into an email - no clicks required
By snapshot you mean a date
By snapshot you mean a date range? Why not create for the range?
I wouldn't store PDF on the site. I think it would be better to use and PDF generator and use url based filters on the link to provide the snapshot and then process it on the fly as a PDF for on-demand download.
We do this for on-demand reports etc and use a dompdf http://code.google.com/p/dompdf/
EDMEDiA Australia
Fixed snapshot
Thanks for your comment - yes, you are right - we should be able to just generate a "copy" dynamically on request - however the content on this site is pretty dynamic,and they have a habit of editting existing nodes after those nodes have already been used on newsletter - so we can never "re-create" the content that was included in the newsletter (unless I get really complicated about using revision dates etc).
I will have a closer look at dompdf though. Thanks!
Jason Brooks
Lab4 Web Design
Lara, Victoria, Australia.
modules
there is a fieldmapper api module that can be used to scrape rss feeds and create new content (based on a content type you set up) and then you could create a view to grab all those articles and then rss that...