A recipe for building newsletters in Drupal
Update on April 9, 2013 - the description of Drupal 7 version of this module with links to the module files is available here
I'll start right away by saying that sending newsletters with Drupal is excruciatingly painful, and we do not recommend it at all unless you're subscriber-ship is extremely low. Many other software packages and solution providers do it much better than Drupal ever will. So this isn't about sending your newsletter, it's about how to build your newsletter for email and web delivery.
Our method is simple. Similar to modules like Simplenews we will be creating a newsletter content type that will store the contents of the newsletter. The only difference is that Drupal will not be sending the emails. We will be exporting HTML to our newsletter sending application of choice (We use CiviCRM).
The basic structure of the node depends on the structure of your newsletter. We will use our Freeform newsletter as an example. Our newsletter consists of a number of various sections almost all of which are controlled by CCK fields.
Our newsletter content types consist of:
- Text fields for section headers
- Textarea for header and footer text
- node reference fields for content
