Newsletters News and Center Pieces are Falling Into Place

The NewslettersPackage has received a major overhaul, refactoring, and feature improvements. So much so that the NewslettersPackage is becoming a powerful "email marketing tool". At this point the schema is pretty much settled down, and there is a bevy of beautiful features, including:

• Use of phpMailer
• Tight integration with groups in the UsersPackage
• Message tracking number of Reads
• Users can now permanently unsubscribe from Everything.
• Newsletters and their editions are now publically browseable (or not)

Currently the package is still in pre-beta, however the schema seems settled at this point. There are lots of groovy features still needed (like nice statistical eye candy, click-through tracking, and more). If you are interested in taking it for a spin, "cvs checkout newsletters" in your bitweaver directory, and get involved! We'd love to have help with the package development.

In other news, center pieces in layouts now seem to be working very well. Center Pieces allow you to put multiple center blocks together of different packages together for a package home page. For example on bitweaver.org, there is a static wiki page at the top followed by recent articles. It would also be possible to insert a center piece of blog posts or image galleries.

Along with this, module parameters can now be entered in the XML attribute="foo" format in addition to the existing the http "GET" format. These changes are in the ReleaseOne CVS Branch and will be included in the next release. If anyone notices any display issues, please drop by ConnectingToIrc and let us know asap...