When preparing an email newsletter, one part of it that is time consuming is gathering together all the content that is needed. In my experience, virtually all the content already exists elsewhere, such as in the local CMS, in CiviCRM, or on a blog, or some other online source.    So I was thinking how can I make this process easier.  What I did: I created mail merge tokens for CiviCRM that autofill a list of recent blog posts, stories, or any other type of CMS content.  So the end-user sees a list of tokens, one for each content type, each term/category, each aggregator feed,  and for each date range. Such as "Content of type 'blog' created in the last 7 days" .  What is particulary powerful about this approach, is that if you are also using a CMS aggregator (such as the aggregator module in Drupal core) then virually any external RSS feed is turned into CMS content, which is now available as a CiviCRM token. (The original blog post about this extension is at: https://civicrm.org/blogs/pogstonesarahgladstone/easier-creation-email-newsletters-content-tokens )

Thanks to community involvement (specifically thanks to https://github.com/jorich-2000), there is a new version of the Content Token extension.  This version now supports Joomla, in addition to Drupal7, Drupal6, and WordPress.

The lastest version of the "Content Token" extension can be downloaded from: https://civicrm.org/extensions/content-tokens

If you like this extension, you will also likely enjoy my other extension: the "Fancy Token" extension which provides tokens for upcoming events, contribution pages, profiles, and WebForms. 

I am looking forward to getting feedback on this.

• CiviMail
• Drupal
• Extensions
• Joomla
• WordPress