I have three related questions here regarding the Magento newsletter system - they are in the one post if that's OK. I thought it was appropriate do but feel free to break them up.
1) My client will only need to be able to send out an occasional newsletter from magento. This would only be a few times a year. Do I still need to set up a cron job for that and is there no way to just "Press Send"? The reason I ask is that when she does decide to send the newsletter she'd want it to send straight away, and not have to wait; so would that mean that I'd need to have a cron job executing for instance every hour 24-7 just to get a newsletter to send within 60 minutes of her sending it, or am I misunderstanding the entire system ?
2)There is no queue button on my newsletter template page that I can see. I am running 1.6. Is it missing or hidden or do I need to do something else to actually queue the newsletter for the cron ? I see someone is modifying app/code/core/Mage/Newsletter/etc/config.xml but this is not much use to me as it will be overwritten in the next update surely.
3)Can someone explain to me why there is only a place for templates and yet no place for the newsletters themselves. Normally newsletter software that I've used before eg phplist or mailchimp has one spot for template creation ( which is often done by a developer) and then when the client wants to send a new newsletter they just add content to essentially the blank spaces - but magento seems to put the two together and strangely6 label them template, which is not what it is at all. Can someone explain the logic behind this or point out what I'm missing ? I dont want to have to explain to my client that they just need to delete the content from the previous newsletter and replace it with new content.
Looks like I have the dubious honor of answering my own question:
1) No there's no way to just press "Send". You have to let the server send it via a cron job.
2) The queue button is indeed there it's hiding over on the right in the newsletter template page - it's not up with the regular buttons, no it's a drop down under the action column - nicely hidden Magento ;-) !!
3 )It seemingly does have both in a way, but it's not obvious. When you create a template and save it then you've got a template as you might expect; however when you choose the queue button from the dropdown it opens that template and you get to make changes to it before you queue it .... or at least that's how it looks to me at the moment anyhow.
Related
Does anyone know if it is possible to make the Magento Transactional emails (such as Order Confirmation) responsive, so that they also look good on Mobile devices?
Thank you in advance.
BJ
p.s. I searched the Internet for a long time, but could not find any information about it.
Just login in Admin and move on System->Transactional Emails and click on Create New Template now load the template from the drop down e.g. New Order.
Them write the responsive CSS in the template and save with different name.
Now move on System->Configuration->Sales Emails and select your custom template for New Order Confirmation Template, and save it.
I am trying to create a survey template in Outlook for the first time. So I created a very basic template which has one question and three radio buttons to choose from. When I use Tools\Forms\Design a Form it looks fine however, when I try and test it by going to File\New\Choose Form and emailing myself a copy I receive my standard message page (nothing like the form I just created!). Can anyone explain what I am doing incorrectly? Thanks!
Quote:
Common email clients share a propensity to distrust forms in email
messages. But they differed greatly in how they handled the intruding
forms.
Because of this I suggest to not use forms in emails as you might not get the expected result.
I'm attempting to do a number of things with the success page (order confirmation page) in Magento but I am faced with the nuisance of having to create a test order every time I wish to see a change because hitting refresh redirects you. The style changes are easy as I can fresh only the CSS if necessary but some of the conversion analytics (e.g. Google) and other items I'm trying to include on the final page aren't as straight forward. Is there a better way? Thanks in advance.
Magento clears session information for a customer after they place their order as it assumes most users will leave the site after that. It’s more of a user-experience feature than it is a security feature. That being the way it is, when you hit refresh on the order confirmation page, your information will disappear and Magento will generally tell you “you have no items in your cart.”
You can disable this for the purpose of development by going to app/code/core/Mage/Checkout/controllers/OnepageController.php and commenting out the line that says:
$session->clear();
Should be line 240. Change it to //$session->clear(); and Magento will instead allow the session to expire naturally according to how long session life is set to for that specific instance. Now you can style success.phtml or see what conversion information is being sent to various service providers (PepperJam, Google, Proclivity, etc..) without having to create more than 1 test order.
You could use Selenium, Firefox Add-on to record a macro for placing an order. This should avoid the repetitive process of placing an order.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/selenium-expert-selenium-ide/
You can also use this bookmarklet to auto-populate the fields on the checkout page.
http://www.nicksays.co.uk/auto-populate-magento-checkout-bookmarklet/
Is there any way to update an activity entity's create form's fields by using a dialog without saving the entity first?
Let me explain.
The customer calls us and our represent opens a phone call activity. At this point it's on a 'create new' state.
Now, since we have freaking many contact informations and other things related to it in the system I have created a dialog to help user to find out the caller's informations. The dialog first asks the name who is calling. Then it asks about which building / apartment he is calling (it's part of our business model). Then it keeps asking things for a while.
Finally, the dialog has gathered all necessary information and is about the put the values into the form.
But here's the thing. I'm using an Update process within the dialog, but of course I can't update something that doesn't exists. So at the moment it works like we always have to save and give a title for the entity first. Then run the dialog.
It's a minor fault but it may be a problem if, for some reason, in the middle of a dialog, the process is cancelled. Then we would have an empty phone call there with some title. Besides one extra click is always one extra click.
I hope you understood my question.
Please feel free to asks.
Bye!
Like Greg, it seems to me that you are trying to capture information about the contact and the phone call at the same time, so starting by opening a new record may not be the most structured way to go about this. A couple of possibilities:
use a dialog but don't run it against a Contact necessarily. Maybe run it against a user. Use the first few pages to establish if this is an existing Contact and if not, create one from data captured, then create the phone call record against the selected or created Contact. You can run a dialog like this from a link on a dashboard for example, you don't need to navigate to users screen to do it.
Gareth Tucker has written several articles on his blog at http://gtcrm.wordpress.com about contact centre automation, including some interesting ideas (with free downloadable examples) about using JScript on the phone call form to capture contact details and create a linked Contact record on the fly
It sounds to me like the business process could be improved. Ideally your solution would be to change your dialog process so that it runs against the customer (contact?) entity, i.e. when your customer calls up, users find that record and run your dialog instead of creating a phone call activity then running the dialog.
That said, if I understand your question correctly, you are using the dialog perhaps to assist the user in finding the customer's details. Is this true? I don't understand how this would work so you may need to provide us with some extra information here.
If the underlying issue is that the user can't find the customer, it sounds like you need to provide more search fields for the user in the customer view...
Who is the acting user for cron updates drupal when creating a triggered rule? What I'm referring to is the php variable available to the developer when using the custom php code option in the "add a condition" widget. Is the acting user supposed to be anyone who is logged in at the time the cron runs? Or does this have to be someone who navigates to cron.php? The reason I'm asking is that I want to use the cron to kick off a sql query that looks to see if someone meets the requirements to earn a certain badge I've created for a site like SO. I know I could just use the view content event, but since that fires every time someone views a node, I'm trying to avoid that.
It depends on how cron is triggered, for cron jobs, it will be the anonymous user.