First – let’s talk about the NOW. Newsletters are back in Tendenci 6!!
Tendenci’s Open Source Integrated Newsletter Generator
A lot of long time clients have resisted upgrading to the responsive-mobile-first-open-source-version of Tendenci 6, or even the responsive designs in Tendenci 5, because of one killer feature in Tendenci 4 (the old Microsoft version) and that was NEWSLETTERS.
We listened. We heard you. It’s back.
The ability to communicate with your membership by study group, by event attendees, to only the board of directors, etc. We heard you loud and clear and the newsletter generator is back in full force in Tendenci 6. To prevent the tragedy of the commons (e.g. another client blacklisting a shared email server) we are requiring clients to use either their own SES or a product like Mailgun.com for the newsletter. This will offload the sending to the third party and each client can manage their own newsletter statistics for the first time.
This also alleviates another area of pain. If one client out of 500 ish purchased an email list and the bounce rate was too high, well, then EVERYBODY got slammed and nobody could even do a “forgot my password” request because another client blacklisted the mail server. It’s just the way the Internet works. Why can’t we all just get along, right?
If you are on Tendenci 6 (not an automatic upgrade from T4 or T5 because we pushed more of the design to the front end … um…. where it belongs and the designers can do their thing. Rock on you artsy folk who make software look awesome. More freedom for you. (just please no comic sans, ok?)
If you are on T4, which is approaching end of life very quickly as I type this (Microsoft, not Tendenci dictated these dates so please don’t send email asking if we can secure something Microsoft isn’t patching anymore).
Turn a negative into a positive. Now is a great time to consider a mobile first bootstrap 3 theme that integrates with Tendenci 6! They’re smart, mobile first, responsive, and make you a rock start. Check out www.wrapbootstrap.com for bootstrap3 themes. They’re kinda awesome like this:
Just one of the many new functional mobile-first capabilities that have been built into open source tendenci since we started the rewrite in 2009. This is functionality we have been able to bring back with the help of the Tendenci community.
After 17 years we know the functionality the people who use the site to register for events need, as well as the needs of the people on the board-of-directors and the person functioning as Executive Director. It just takes a while to rewrite 10 years of code in a completely different technology. And we’re just getting started!
Check the help file for the Tendenci Association Newsletter Sending Tool for more detail and edits over time.
How do I upgrade from T5 to T6 (self-hosting)? I can’t find tutorial anywhere.
Thx
Ryan – the upgrade guides for Tendenci are posted on readthedocs now
5 to 6 https://tendenci.readthedocs.org/en/latest/upgrade/upgrade-to-tendenci6.html
6 to 7 https://tendenci.readthedocs.org/en/latest/upgrade/upgrade-to-tendenci7.html
7 to 7.1 https://tendenci.readthedocs.org/en/latest/upgrade/upgrade-to-tendenci7.1.html
Our end goal is to make the upgrade process as easy as clicking one button. Theme changes have prevented us from doing that before. The above guides and some Edits to your theme and you should be good.
[UPDATE: All Tendenci upgrade guides are now posted. See above reply with specific links to rtd.. And of course make a full backup on your system first as always.
Ryan –
we haven’t had a chance to write one yet. The challenge is the same reason you will like it better. In T5 we had too many things in core and in .env. So to design a theme you wound up using !IMPORTANT in classes a lot.I wanted it more like CSS Zengarden so default and base html templates are now in the theme. Which makes them compatible with the bootstrap-theme.css files from sites like wrapbootstrap.com (3x only and not 3x ones that were upgraded through those automated scripts).
And we’ve been using our private git server quite a bit lately until we get it right so that when people click the “auto update” it does NOT destroy their site. Which it kinda would right now. That would be bad.If you are adventurous there is a slightly outdated tendenci6 branch on github.com/tendenci now . I’ll ask the team about when we can push out the latest one. It just it going to be a manual process, but not a hard one to upgrade if you have a complex theme.
Really, if you copied the T5 base html and tendenci_global.css and put those in your T6 site with a theme it should work. We just had Template_Dirs=(x,y) in core and then += in the project. Note template dirs is still defined but left blank so you can load the style sheets in the order you want.
Now we just have to put in the traps that stop the auto-upgrade process or we’re going to have a lot of angry folks out there! Do feel free to play with the t6 branch on github though, just not on your main site.
We have a demo up at http://t6demo.tendenci.com/ but self reg is turned off for now.[Update: tendenci demo is available at https://demo.tendenci.com and you can login here just realize it resets every hour or so. https://demo.tendenci.com/accounts/login/ (use “admin” for both the userename and the pw.
I should add one more thing. T5 to T6 is up to Django 1.6. South migrations will work on this upgrade. We’ve had some challenges with null values but that’s normal. T7 will reset all migrations but start at the baseline of the last known state of T6. Just some housecleaning. But yes, the db should migrate.Do you use any of the add-on modules? Those are the ones we’re working on now so if you don’t we might be able to expedite….
Hard to believe that is all done. Whoooop!