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modules

Newsletter subscription management in Drupal with E-mail Marketing Framework

Yesterday at the Belgian Drupal User Group (DUG) I presented the E-mail Marketing Framework module, also known as EMF. EMF is a Drupal module that makes an abstraction of the APIs of newsletter or e-mail marketing services like MailChilmp, Campaign Monitor, ... Think of it as the Wysiwyg module for e-mail marketing.

E-mail Marketing was developed based on the observation that most of these services like MailChilmp, Campaign Monitor, ... have kind of the same functionality. So EMF focusses on the UI and other functionality and leaves the actual hard work (subscriptions management, ...) to a plugin module. By writing a plugin module for your own mailing service you can immediately enjoy all functionality provided by EMF on your own site.

Still not clear? Watch my presentation:

December 15, 2010Drupal, emf, modules

Automatically create table of contents (jumplinks) for long pages in Drupal

When working on long pages with a lot of headings, a technique often used to give the reader an overview what follows on the page is using a "table of contents" or "jumplinks". Anchors are attached to the all headings and a list of links is added to the top of the page that "jump" to the corresponding heading. Creating and maintaining these jumplinks is a tedious job. Mostly you want the links to be the same as the heading titles and as soon as the titles change, you need to edit the table of contents too.

I've created a small module, called Table of Contents, that creates this table of contents automatically for you by inspecting your node's body and gathering all your heading tags (h1 through h7). The module uses jQuery to do all the heavy lifting. It actually uses a jQuery plugin by Doug Neiner.

I have also implemented a Smooth Anchors jQuery plugin which changes the default "jumping" behavior of browsers to a "scrolling" one.

Drupal "Subsites" module allows you to easily create minisites

I just released a new Drupal module. It was one that has been laying around for some time now, but got constantly improved to make it reusable on as much sites as possible. I stripped the feature set down to the minimum and called it "subsites".

Download it at its Drupal project page.

What are subsites?

Subsites are a part of your website that can have its own menu, theme, custom CSS or anything else you want.

An example? Suppose you are making a magazine website. On most magazine websites you might want to create small subsites about a certain topic. This subsite probably has its own menu (next to the primary navigation). It might also have its own look. This new look could be a minimal change from the default site look (a different background, different colors, ...) or it might be a completely new look.

November 03, 2009Drupal, modules, subsites

E-mail Marketing Framework Module released : a framework for direct marketing services like Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp

Some time ago I released the Campaign Monitor Advanced module. A module that provides advanced integration with the excellent Campaign Monitor mailing list service. Cool stuff was available in it like support for multiple lists, automatic fetching of lists and fields from your Campaign Monitor account, asynchronous pushing of subscription and unsubscription requests and the ability to match Campaign Monitor custom fields to Drupal tokens, profile fields and PHP code. Cool huh?

Well, you'll be happy to know that all this stuff is available for more services then Campaign Monitor only. I have completely rewritten the module as a framework, called E-mail Marketing Framework, to make it work with virtually every mailing list service that provides an API to some of its functionality. Right now, out the box only MailChimp and Campaign Monitor integration is provided.

October 20, 2009Campaign Monitor, Drupal, emf, modules

New module released for advanced integration for Campaign Monitor in Drupal

Thanks to the the sponsorship of Drupal integrator Calibrate, I've just released a new Drupal module that integrates your Drupal site with your Campaign Monitor account.

Campaign Monitor is a fully rebrandable online mailing list tool, and by adding this module you can integrate the users of your Drupal site with your Campaign Monitor subscriber lists, in a quite advanced way. This module includes features like:

  • Support for multiple lists.
  • Automatic fetching of lists and fields from your Campaign Monitor account.
  • Asynchronous pushing of subscription and unsubscription requests to make it fast and reliable to keep things synced.
  • Match Campaign Monitor custom fields to Drupal tokens, profile fields and PHP code.

Visit the Drupal site to grab the Campaign Monitor Advanced module. If you don't need that level of integration, you can use the simpler existing Campaign Monitor module, which is still available.

campaign-monitor.png

August 25, 2009Campaign Monitor, Drupal, modules