Hello Everyone and god bless you!
I have been using the Devo Extension since October of last year and it truly is an invaluable tool for the spreading of the gospel.
I use it on a Devotional Website where users can login and read daily word.
What I would like to be able to do as well is to have some users subscribe and receive the daily, weekly or monthly content by email.
This would be a very useful function as it would allow those who cannot log in to the site or for some reason forget to, to receive their devotionals in their Inbox.
I was wondering if it would be possible to integrate this function into the Devo Extension, or if there is another way to have typo3 automatically send the devo content as email to a certain group of users.

Thanks for the the time and may the Lord bless you.

Hey Andrea,
I don't have any good answers for your myself, but I wanted to let you know that Dave (the wec_devo developer) is out of town for a couple days, which is why he hasn't responded yet.

I think the ability to push content to users would be a great feature too. Email would be great and I'm also interested in the possibility of RSS feeds for devotional content.

One current possiblity for doing this in TYPO3 is the DirectMail extension. DirectMail leds you send TYPO3 pages as emails to frontend users or special email lists. It's not the most intuitive thing in the world to set up, but if you're feeling adventurous, it might do what you're looking for.

Thanks,
Jeff

Thanks Jeff for your quick reply. I think RSS would be great as well, for those users which are sort of more technically advanced. I also heard the same about the Directmail extension, that it can be used for sending any typo3 page as email.

As far as I can see, it's not easy to set up and use, that's my main problem. I do not have the technical knowledge to be able to integrate it seamlessly with wec_devo.
Directmail is quite complicated and feature rich. It seems simpler to me and more user-friendly to integrate this function directly into the wec_devo, so by simply selecting an option box, one can, for example, send a certain wec_devo category to a certain user group. One wouldn't even need to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, as Directmail could work (hypothetically) and for handling users and groups there's already wec_user, and other extensions.
One idea is to put together an extension which merely configures other extensions. Sort of like the timtab extension did, in using tt_news, ve_guestbook, and realurl to create a blog extension.
This function could be another added value to this already very special and well thought-of extension.
Alternatively, if this were not possible, could someone figure out a way to configure the Directmail extension to say automatically mail a certain category or groups to a certain amount of users?

Thank you all for the patience and the time in reading and replying
Andrea G.V.

Hi Andrea,

Thanks for your comments about the Devotional extension -- they are much appreciated!

The RSS feed would excellent. It is planned in the future. We are looking how to rework and improve our existing extensions and this would be a very valuable way.

I have not used the DirectMail extension at all here. I did see for Typo3 v4.0 that a new DirectMail extension is released and may have more features. You might want to check that out.

-Dave

Well, RSS sounds fine for more advanced users, but personally for the kind of people I am ministering to it would go way over their head. Plus, many of the ones I witness and minister too are very busy or official people, which don't start subscribing to RSS feeds, or take too much time to surf. But people who do check their email via PC or PDA and who are interested in getting a daily dose of the word of God. Personally, I tried to get into configuring Directmail, but it's too complicated for me, plus I don't understand how it could be programmed to automatically send via email to a list of addresses the daily content, because that's what I would need.
I was wondering if anyone knows of a simpler way to do it, either by compiling an extension which configures itself into the system or by figuring out a system embedded in the wec_devo which offers this capability. Personally, I would love to contribute to this project, but I am a fulltime missionary with limited resources and limited technical know-how.

Is someone comes up with a solution, it would be worderful. God bless you all!
Andrea G.V.

Hi Andrea,

Yes, I understand about the RSS feeds. I have built in subscriptions for the Prayer Connector & Discussion Forum so that they could receive new posts. I can see adding something like this for the Devotional Journal. The one issue with the Devo is that you would need to add it to your cron job -- which requires system access -- so that it could be sent out every day (like at midnight). The Connector/Discussion send out when it receives a message.

At Ginghamsburg, we use a mailer script outside of Typoe that grabs parts of the daily Devotional from the Typo3 database and builds a custom email message for it. If you are interested in it, please let me know and I can send it to you. It is written in PHP, and if you know PHP somewhat, it should be easy to modify. All you would have to do is customize it and then add it to your cron job for your website.

-Dave

yes, txs Dave would love to have that script as well as a few explanations on how to customize and use.

It would be wonderful to integrate a similar function into Typo3, which grabs the mailing list directly from the typo3 userlist and sends to the subribed members.

About cron jobs, there are some free services which run cron jobs automatically for users who don't have access to a server. I'll post the links as soon as I get ahold of them.

Txs for all your help, God bless you.

Andrea G.V.

hi dave, still hoping to get the script you mentioned in your previous post...
or if anyone has any better idea on how to send daily Devo content to subscribed wec users...

txs for all your help
God bless

BTW, anyone who needs a daily and completely FREE cron job, www.webcron.org.
Enjoy...

Hi Andrea,

Forgot to post this. I have put a link to our devotion mailer. You can see how it is to pull from the wecdevo_content. We also use an internal wec_dailyevotional. You just need to setup your db passwords correctly, then format the message...and it should be fine.

One other thing -- somehow you will need to set the $toemail so that it points to a list. You could read this in within PHP from a file, if that worked. Or if you had a Typo3 signup, you could read it from a database table.

Hope this is helpful. Let me know if you have any questions.

http://webempoweredchurch.com/fileadmin/proj/wec_devo/misc/devomailer.php_example

-Dave