Tendenci – The Open Source AMS Blog
Community Blog for Open Source AMS Makers
This update has been a long time coming! We appreciate all of the patience and ideas on how to make importing users into Tendenci better and more user-friendly.
You can now rename the columns to fit your own needs. It does not have to be in the order of the import template. The header and the title rows can be left in the spreadsheet. Test it out.
Please visit the helps files on preparing a file for user import or learn how to import users into Tendenci.
The Tendenci team works hard to keep your Web marketing efforts successful and effective. In a recent effort to combat SPAM, we have implemented some changes in the way your Web site sends your emails, newsletters and notifications.
These changes not only make your site’s email compliant with Internet rules and regulations of email delivery, but also increase your site’s email deliverability.
When an Email notification, Contact Form Submission or Newsletter is sent from your Tendenci site, it will now have a sender address of DO-NOT-REPLY-TENDENCI@schipul.net. This email address matches the address of the mail server that is being used to process and send your emails – which looks more legitimate to other mail servers, resulting in increased deliveries.
What are you talking about?
Old Way:
To a server, the following sample email header could look like Spam as it is sent with the sender’s own email address from a Tendenci site’s newsletter generator (@hotmail.com vs. @schipul.net):
Return-Path: mdinkleplotz@hotmail.com
Sender: mdinkleplotz@hotmail.com
From: "Mary Dinkleplotz" <mdinkleplotz@hotmail.com>
Subject: My organization’s newsletter!
New and Improved Way:
By changing the ‘Sender’ path, your email will appear less suspicious as the sender address matches your Tendenci site’s mail server that is being used to send the email (@schipul.net):
Return-Path: DO-NOT-REPLY-TENDENCI@schipul.net
Sender: DO-NOT-REPLY-TENDENCI@schipul.net
From: "Mary Dinkleplotz" <mdinkleplotz@hotmail.com>
Subject: My Organization’s Newsletter
How does this affect me?
If I were sending a newsletter to you from the Tendenci website, you would receive my Newsletter in your inbox and the "Sender" would be DO-NOT-REPLY-TENDENCI@schipul.net (this is generally not displayed by the email application).
The "From and/or Reply To” address will continue to have the email address of the user who was specified in the ReplyTo field pictured below:
You must be sure to include your correct address in the ‘ReplyTo’ field
(see below) to ensure email replies are sent to your email address.
Otherwise, they will be sent to the DO-NOT-REPLY-TENDENCI@schipul.net
and will not make it to your inbox, which would be sad.
The Good News:
This mandatory update was made specifically to help improve your email deliverability. It also makes your email compliant with regulations outlined here: http://www.openspf.org/Best_Practices/Webgenerated
Please Note!:
With this change, some of the Tendenci Newsletter bounce back features will be temporarily disabled. This means you will not be receiving your newsletter bounce backs until further notice.
Many Tendenci clients count on receiving their bouncebacks to remove or update email addresses on their mailing lists. We are aware that this temporary disruption may be a challenge for you, so we can offer a solution for you.
By editing your Site Variables, you can revert to the old email sender Return-Path, instead of utilizing the new, compliant sender email address. To make this change, you will need to edit the variable called: SiteEmailNoReplyAddress
We strongly recommend that you do not change this variable as YOUR
EMAIL DELIVERY RATES WILL DROP IF YOU REVERT BACK!
If you are still not sure if you like the change, this quote from Ed Schipul pretty much sums it all up:"Yes – it IS less convenient. But spammers make everything hell so we need to do this." – Ed Schipul, CEO
Happy holidays Tendenci users! Before the new year begins we would like you to hear about an update on form captcha. Captcha is an image with a special code in it that appears on web forms in Tendenci and is used to prevent spam. It looks like this:
It can be very pesky to fill out for administrators and users so we have changed it to only show for anonymous users. This update will go live soon so keep those eyelids peeled.
Have a wonderful holiday and a happy new year!
We have updated a couple of membership reports recently. Not only do they
have the new look and feel now, they also include the total active
members. Under the Member Trends on the membership console page, click on Active Members YTD and Active Members YTD by Type, it will bring you to the updated reports. Certainly you have to be an admin to do so.
The active members YTD gives you a good visual of the trend of your membership growth at a glance.
You can also exclude the total active members and take a close look at the new members and renewing
members.
This update can be found in the tendenci help file: How Can I View Members Over Time by Month?
Good morning Tendenci lovers! You should be aware of our vapor ware page that contains awesome core ideas for modification to the Tendenci software.
Here you will find lots of good ideas that are pending financial resources. If you are interested in funding in conjunction with another client. Please let us know.
You can email us at support@tendenci.com or call at 281.497.6567 ext. 411. Ask for Kim.
Seasons Greeting from your Team at Schipul.
As some of you now already Outlook 2007 does not read back ground images in newsletters. Most of you Tendenci users probably have a Tendenci newsletter template that does not look well in Outlook 2007 because of the back ground graphic issue.
Tim Newton the creative director here at Schipul has created a lovely help file that explains how to design newsletters for Outlook 2007.
Check out the help file here:
If you need us to help you change these and make them viewable in 2007, contact support@tendenci.com.
You can now keep the content of your home page fresh by adding RSS feeds to the home page of your Tendenci web site. Give your users/members the latest and greatest information by adding feeds to your home page.
Please content support@tendenci.com if you are interested in taking advantage of the functionality. This addition of RSS to the home page only takes a short time but we at Schipul will need to do this for you.
Good news..Now your members/users can be an editor or an administrator of Content Management and Calendar Events Module.
If a user is an editor of Content Management or Calendar events they can make edits to the modules and they are sent to pending approval. An administrator will get an email when an edit has been made and approve the change before the change goes live.
If a user is an admin of Content Management or Calendar events they can make edits to the module and the changes go live immediately.
This is just one way to give extra control to users while still monitoring content and not opening up complete access for edits to your site.
For more, visit the help files on how to set this up on your site.
Did you know that from your Tendenci user profile you can add user identities to identify areas of social networks you are connected to? Encourage your Tendenci users/members to add their identities to display social networks. This is a great way to see who is socially connected to sites like Flickr, Youtube, Facebook, Digg etc.
After have you added your user identities, there will be a visual display of icons on your user profile of identities you have added and are connected to.
I am pushing to integrate blog identities here also. Check back soon.
Photos and comments received some tiny updates worth mentioning.
You are now finally able to see the number of photos inside of a photo album.
Example: https://www.tendenci.com/en/photos/
Comments have user icons next to them so that we can make fun of your mug while we read your comment. It’s the little things that make a
difference.
Example: https://www.tendenci.com/en/photos/v/132
