Singing & Dancing walk-through with screenshots

This document will walk you through some of the more important features of Singing & Dancing. You'll learn how to set up Singing & Dancing, and how to configure your newsletters.

You can click on the screenshots to make them larger. Please send any feedback that you have to this list.

If you're installing Singing & Dancing, make sure you've followed the installation instructions.

Singing & Dancing can be installed like any other Plone Product through the Add-On Products link in the site configuration panel. Click on Site Setup to get there, and install the Product:

A new link appears in the Add-On Product configuration section. Click it to get to the Singing & Dancing administration interface:

The main configuration page of Singing & Dancing allows you to visit three different areas: channels management, collectors management and statistics. We'll take a closer look at the Channels:

The channels management screen lists all channels that are available in your site. Singing & Dancing sets up a default channel when it's installed. This channel is called Newsletter. And it's what we're going to take a look at. Click on the channel's name to configure the details of that channel:

The Edit tab of our channel allows us to rename our channel and add a description, amongst other settings.

Changing to the Subscriptions tab, we can see manage our subscribers. We don't have any subscribers currently. So let's add one. Normally when someone subscribes to your newsletter, they'll get an e-mail to confirm their subscription. This is not the case for subscriptions that were added through the administration interface:

In the Composers tab, we can configure a couple more things, like what stylesheets are used, and what the e-mail header fields will be. If you're a developer, it'll be useful for you to know that the composer is that part of a channel that renders the actual e-mail. The composer also has the the template that's used to render our final e-mail. You can plug-in your own composer through the Python API, even one that sends out mobile text messages instead of e-mails!

Finally, there's the Preview tab of our channel, which gives us an idea about how the e-mail's gonna look like that we send out. Clicking on the Generate button, we can see that our newsletter is pretty empty. There's no news items! By the way, you don't have to worry that your subscribers will ever see an e-mail like this. Singing & Dancing is configured not to actually send e-mails without content.

Now what controls what goes into the e-mail? There's two scenarios here, really. One is where you want to send out individual pages or news items of your site manually. The other is where you leave it off to Singing & Dancing to automatically collect and send items in your portal according to rules that you set up. We'll try the latter first. First, we'll select a collector for our channel. Then we'll click on that collector's title to get to the configuration screen of that collector. You've guessed it: Collectors are responsible for collecting the items to be sent out.

This is the configuration screen of the collector, a powerful component of Singing & Dancing that allows you to specify what content ends up in a newsletter and what doesn't. Let's take a closer look at what this collector's configured to send out. We can click on the Edit the Smart Folder link to find out:

So there's our standard Smart Folder. You can see that it's set up to find all published News Items in the site. You can use the normal Smart Folder interface to check if you got the criteria right, and furthermore, you can use the standard RSS feature to use your newsletter as a feed!

Let's add a normal News Item to our site. Naturally, this one'll be found by our Smart Folder and therefore be sent out as a newsletter. And indeed, the preview function now shows our news item, which we called It's fantastic news. By default, Singing & Dancing will put the item title, description and a link to the item into the newsletter. If you're a programmer, you can easily change this behaviour. The behaviour when sending out individual items manually is also different. We'll take a look at that later.

Now, how will your users subscribe to your newsletter? Easy! Note the address in the address bar. It's the URL of the newsletter plus /subscribe.html at the end. Users will receive an e-mail for confirmation before they're subscribed for real.

An alternative way of subscribing to your newsletter is through a portlet. Singing & Dancing ships with its own Plone portlet for subscription. Use the Manage portlets link and add a Channel subscribe portlet anywhere in your site:

You can configure that portlet to your heart's desire. Don't forget to choose The channel to enable subscription to, which is Newsletter in our case. The second picture shows how our portlet looks like:

Now let's dive into one of the more advanced features of Singing & Dancing. Let's say we wanted to have two categories of news items, one for Sports and one for Politics. We'd like our subscribers to be able to choose which of the categories they're interested in. For this purpose, let's add two folders to our Plone site, one called Sports News, the other Politics News.

Back at the channels management screen, we can click Latest News to reach our collector. We'll now configure our collector so that it'll collect any items from either the Sports News or the Politics News folder.

First of all, let's remove the Smart Folder that's in there now by clicking Remove this block. We'll then add another Collector block called Sports News. This one will have a Smart Folder that collects all items in the Sports News folder:

Now, to allow our subscribers to choose on of the two, or both, sections, we'll make this block Subscriber optional:

We configure the Smart Folder contained in our new block to get items from the Sports News folder:

After doing the same for the Politics News folder, we'll have a subscription form with two options. Subscribers can now choose what they're interested in. Of course you could also make different newsletters altogether, but sometimes making a newsletter user configurable is more convenient.

Remember that we said that this newsletter is going out automatically. But when? To configure this, we'll go back to the channels management screen once more and select a scheduler for our channel. A scheduler defines when a newsletter is sent out. There's a variety of schedulers available:

We can now edit our new scheduler. Let's make sure it's active as schedulers are inactive by default. Inactive means that no e-mail is going to be sent out automatically. Furthermore, by selecting an appropriate time for the Triggered last time field, we can define at which time of the day the newsletter is going out. Choose yesterday at 9:00 AM to send out your newsletter at 9:00 AM the next day, and the day after the next day and so on. Remember that you don't have to worry about sending e-mails without content. If there's no news, we won't send any mail.

Remember that I told you earlier that there's an alternative way to send out mails, without all the automatic collecting, scheduling, and sending. You can send any item in your site as a newsletter by choosing Send as newsletter from the Actions menu. This will allow you to choose which channel to send this to and again, to see a preview before you send it out:

Enjoy!