Creating an Online Newsletter with Drupal
By Michael J. Ross2008-07-11
In the early stages of widespread Internet popularity, the majority of online newsletters were distributed through mass e-mailing to subscribers. But this approach has two significant downsides: Now that spam composes the bulk of e-mail messages, Internet users and ISPs are doing everything in their power to limit access to their e-mail inboxes. This naturally has made it much more difficult for legitimate newsletters to reach all of their paid subscribers (even though the typical newsletter publisher will repeatedly explain to recipients how to add the newsletter's address to an e-mail whitelist). Secondly, for paid publications that derive their revenues from subscription, and not advertising, e-mailed newsletters can simply be forwarded to multiple (nonpaying) recipients, who in turn can do the same, ad infinitum. This may lead to a popular newsletter, but certainly not a profitable one.
Fortunately, there is a much better approach, and that is the use of a Web site that houses the newsletter and also limits reader access to paying subscribers. The ideal tool for creating such a site, is a content management system (CMS), such as Drupal, which is what we will be using in this tutorial. Specifically, we will explore how to use a forum for organizing the newsletter contents and allowing subscriber feedback, and also how to use a Drupal module for controlling subscriber access.
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