Newsletter Setup

From SubjectsPlus

SubjectsPlus can be set up to send a newsletter to your users at an interval of your choice. Sample below:

Okay, it's not terribly pretty--prettification will come later. Basically, it will list out any new and updated records, research guides, FAQs and TalkBacks (TalksBack?). It's a quick snapshot of what's going on in the system.

Okay, I'm sold. What do I do?

There's a file control/admin/newsletter-cron.php. You could just go directly to this page through your browser whenever you wanted the report to be sent, but who doesn't love automation? So, instead, why not set it up as a cron job.

First, you need to navigate to this file and set some paths and mysql credentials. You can copy these from control/includes/config.php.

Then, you need to set up the cron job on your server. You'll have to google that.

We have it running once a week at Ithaca College, and the librarians seem to find it more useful than they thought they would.

Recipients?

By default, it's set to email only staff members who have access to the records table (i.e., can add and edit things in the Records tab). You can change this around line 52

$q = "SELECT email FROM staff WHERE rxs = '1'";

If you remove the WHERE clause, it will email everyone. You can also tweak the query however you want to slice and dice people.