Development Seed Blog
A Better Page Forwarder
Eric and Ian have been looking for a better “email this page to a friend" module for a while. Drupal currently has two modules with this kind of functionality, but for various reason neither really did what we wanted. A few months back Ian swapped out the emailthispage module for the forward module, and so what I’ve done is take the forward module a little bit further.
We want our sites to send emails with a crisp and clean look and
really were not happy with the plain text emails which the forward module currently produces. We had the plain text vs. html discussion internally and decided that for what we needed html emails were the way to go. Using html really lets us really produce a clean and organized looking email, and one that can include an image or two as well.
The other big change to the module was the addition of dynamic content section. This allows the site admin to select from a few different top 5 lists to include in the body of the email; 5 newest blog entries, 5 most popular entries, 5 newest users and 5 latest comments. Initially we had thought about just including the standard most emailed stories, but as we thought about what would be most useful to our clients and their users we decided that a top 5 most emailed was rather arbitrary and not as useful as some of the other options.
There were a couple of other changes, including swapping out the forward modules ’s flood control for the flood control that is now built into Drupal as well as adding an additional footer field to the email, however really is exciting is where were going to be taking this module the future…
The last change I made to the module was making keep a log of not only when an email is send, but also when someone uses the link in the email to get back to the site. It tracks every time anyone forwards a story to a friend, and every friend who looks at the story. In itself that’s pretty useful, but what can do to make it really useful is use the IP information of both the sender and the checker to map where they are geographically located. We’ll be able to make maps of where our stories travel, and we’ll know what stories have done the traveling.
Comments
Please look at send.module
Send ( http://drupal.org/node/37480 ) sends the entire node body and/or teaser(s) in a multipart HTML message.
It also maintains a history of sent nodes and tracks activities in CiviCRM.
The Mime/HTML email work done for this module was abstracted into the mime mail module, a themable HTML user_mail() replacement module.
tell a friend
Eric,
I posted something on CivicSpace along these lines and got an email from the forward module owner, http://civicspacelabs.org/home/node/15040 . It seems like this is crossing from a simple "email this page" into a full-fledged "tell a friend." Their are two good tell-a-friend type modules in Drupal now, but they are sitewide. Campaigns demand something smarter, like your module, and that engage the person receiving the email in an action--such as "Sign the petition" or "pass this page to 5 friends" or "call your senator."
Although I'm not sure if this module is the place for it, my request is the ability for admin or even users to have more than one forward form. One might be a general forward for blogs and updates, but one might be an action forward with specific content relating to the node. A concrete example was a recent campaign I worked with (not using Drupal). We had a regular tell-a-friend to join the campaign, but also needed one for a new commercial, specific email blasts, and hitting fundraising goals. So I guess the question is, is this type of thing a new module, or an extension of forward? Oh, and how cool is ForwardTrak!
Please add to Drupal CVS
Yes, please submit this as a patch to the forward CVS.
As soon as we get a couple
As soon as we get a couple more kinks
out of it we will have it up there :). Any immediate requests before
we add it to Drupal?
awesome
Wow, this is awesome.
Are you going to make the module publicly available? It would be a huge help to Drupal sites everywhere.
=Tim=
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