Managing Newsletter clusters with lamp & dojo

Edit an article in a language edition of a newsletter

While the newsletter engines like mailman or majordomo work robust and
mature since many years, the challenge of writing and managing many
newsletter editions in a bigger organisation can turn into a medium
project administration task.

The requirements for newsletters which follow the company style
gzuidelines are mostly:

• Newsletter must be in HTML
  (but editors mustn’t write html)
• Newsletter can be in more than one language
• The content must be taken from various source

To manage those needs a „simple“ interface is needed.

The aim inside the project with our enterprise customer was to have the following workflow:

• There can exist newsletters to diffrent Topics.
• Each newsletter can have unlimited editions.
• Each edition can exist in diffrent languages
• Every language edition is a collection of some articles.

Well this is not enough, every article itself can be made of multiple parts like:

• Headlines
• Teasers
• Contents
• Images
• Links
• etc….

Using Dojo 1.0 and PHP5 in the backend we realized an application which allows editors to put in all the contents of the Newsletter without the knowledge of HTML.
By using Templates for rendering the final output it is guaranteed that the newsletter follows the desired corporate Design.

All communication with the Server is done via JSON if possible. When transferring uploads like images we use a hidden frame to send the informations. In this case the server sends back a HTML with a Javascript call like parent.window.foo.bar() back to the client to call an action after the successful POST.