Creating an Online Newsletter with Drupal
By Michael J. Ross2008-07-11
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Subscribers will need a link in order to access the forum and read the newsletter issues. But casual visitors who are not subscribers, should not be able to access the newsletter forum at all, while authenticated users who have yet to subscribe, should not be able to access the newsletter issues.
First, let's make the "Forums" menu item more descriptive. Go to Administer > Site building > Menus, and in the Navigation menu, for the Forums menu item, click its "edit" link in the Operations column. Rename the menu to "Newsletter", and optionally add a description that appears when the user hovers their mouse pointer over its link.
The Newsletter menu item is contained in the Navigation block, so to control the visibility of the former, we modify the latter. Go to Administer > Site building > Blocks, and for the Navigation block, click the "configure" link. In the "Role specific visibility settings" section, set the block so that it only shows for authenticated users and subscribers.
When you have completed all of the aforementioned steps, an authenticated user who has not subscribed to the newsletter, will see zero issues in the newsletter forum:
But a subscriber will see all of the issues (in this case, the one sample issue we created). Clicking the Newsletter link in the left-hand column takes them to the forum:
Clicking the Newsletter link in the forum section takes them to the newsletter:
Clicking the link for a particular issue shows its contents:
There is much more that one can do for creating a compelling online newsletter. But this should be enough to get anyone started.
Tutorial Pages:
» Introduction
» Laying the Foundation
» Initial Theme
» The Homepage
» The Newsletter
» Access Control
» Navigation
