Aylard.ca

The creation of the email based news letter for the Bluewater Chapter of the Antique and Classic Boat Society is almost complete.  This turned into a terrific learning opportunity.

Although the task sounds easy, it is far from a "walk in the park".  The lack of support for HTML and CSS in todays email packages creates numerous problems in formatting an attractive and stable newsletter.  The worst offenders in HTML and CSS support is  Microsoft.  Outlook 2007 uses the authoring tools from Microsoft Word which is not standards compliant.  Support for newsletter layout using <div> tags is not possible.  The use of <table> tag seems to be the preferred method for creating layout.

But first let's set the scene for this project.  The website is based on the current versions of Drupal 6.x, CCK, Views, Simplenews, Insert, Filefield, Imagefield, Imagecache and MIME all custom themed with Zen.

The next background item worth discussing is the reason for an email based newsletter.  The cost of mailing the quarterly newsletter in a paper format continues to be a concern.  The other issue with a paper newsletter is the time delay in sending the newsletter into the US.

The Simplenews module provides a great platform to work with.  The newsletter content type is created using multiple CCK text fields.  A custom node.tpl.php file was created to theme the newsletter using HTML <tables>.  The contents of the CCK text fields are then inserted into the  cells of the tables.  Two tpl.php files are required, one to display the newsletter on-line and one to format the output for the MIME mail function.  The differences in the files are the need to issue a page break at the appropriate places for the email packages.  Most e-mail packages print the header information (To:, From:, and Subject:) along with the body of the e-mail message.  Putting a page break after the header information ensures that the paging of the newsletter remains intact.

Testing of the newsletter was done in Firefox, IE, Safari, Chrome, Thunderbird, Outlook, Outlook Express, Live mail and web based mail.  To say that the results were inconsistent among the browsers and mail packages is an understatement.  One problem that I encountered was a paging problem with Thunderbird Version 2.  Thunderbird would add page breaks in places that were not expected.  The latest release of Thunderbird (Version 3) seems to have resolved the problem.

Most of the browsers had problems handing the CSS {overflow: hidden} property.  The overflow hidden propery would cause the newsletter to truncate when sent to a printer.  The (overflow hidden) is used to align <div> tags of multiple column nodes.  Turning the overflow property from hidden to visible in the print.css file solved this problem.