At Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT), besides a weekly bulletin every Monday to all staff called miniBYTES, we send out all staff emails in a template called microBYTE to distribute non-urgent factual corporate information to all staff. Usually it's one piece of information. But it may contain images and links. What we want to achieve in Matrix is when any staff fills in an online form, they will get a preview page of the microBYTE in the right template and that will be sent to their supervisor to approve. That approver can either send it out by themselves if they have permission or send the microBYTE to us (web services team) to distribute.
I tried to do this by a custom form but unfortunately it doesn't provide the WYSIWYG option so the initiator cannot format their microBYTE. What's the best way to send out the microBYTE and miniBYTES by using matrix? Any ideas? Can anyone help please?
Thanks in advance!
Tina
If a wysiwyg is required to format the information the staff are entering you may want to consider an asset builder creating assets that support the wysiwyg div like a standard page. If the custom form has other fields capturing information you could most likely mimic this though the addition of metadata to the create screen on the asset builder, although you won't have the nth degree validation options that are available with the custom form asset.
Emailing the microBYTE you would have a couple of options. If you were to use an asset builder you may have to then find another way to email the relevant people with the right data. This could be achieved through the use of a send email trigger (limited design application), or the use of the bulkmail asset (ability to send html email with design applied). With the latter option, if you were certain that there was to be only on person writing a microBYTE at any one time you could trigger a bulkmail job to run sending an email with the 'right template' using an asset listing to source the last created standard page, however, if there were 2 people editing at the same time this approach would cause issues.
All of these options can be quite complicated to setup and maintain. With the bulkmail options you get alot of control over the formatting of the message because it allows you to apply a matrix design to new/existing content. I think there would be an even stronger case for the application of bulkmail if your approvers and web services team were comfortable accessing _admin or _edit of a bulkmail job and using the asset picker to choose which created microBYTE to send. The grey area of bulkmail is using a dynamic asset like an asset listing to pick which asset contents it is going to generate for the email (ie, %asset_contents% of 1 asset sorted by last created date).
You don't HAVE to use the Matrix WYSIWYG editor. I have used CKEditor for many of our projects. All you need is a textarea field and you can load up CKEditor. So, you could easily do this with a Custom Form as you can create a textarea field.
Another thing, you can, potentially, use Bulk Mailing from the front end. I have implemented this at PUC for newsletters. It is a trick to set up, but, it provides the ability for users to create an email, choose the email template to use, edit the created email, send a test email to an address, and finally end the bulk mailing. This is all done from the front end.
These are just a few options that hadn't been mentioned, so I just wanted to make you aware.
Thanks a lot Nic and Anthony. I have never used bulkmail before but will try now. But one question, We are using LDAP for authentification. Will that be a problem to use LDAP with bulkmail?
Cheers
Tina
You should not have any problems using LDAP users. Although, you will probably have to put them into a Matrix User Group, as I am not sure you can send mail to LDAP groups.