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The Geek
05-19-2007, 12:29 PM
After the crazy sale the other day, we had a massive influx of great feedback that I have worked like mad to implement. I have gotten most of the things needed in (I think) and released a new package for your pleasure. Please note that there are important upgrade steps in this thread that you really need to follow. But first:

Overview of changes:

1- Implemented inline style additions to make emails look purdy(er) in gmail and hotmail. Even after downloading images, they both strip out URLs in CSS which can result in butt ugly emails. This new feature helps alleviate some of this by allowing you to put much of the styles attributes in line. At least that way the email will look better until they download the images. More on this feature in a minute
2- I have encoded all email headers for better language support (big plus)
3- Put in fix to prevent previews getting snipped in middle of an HTML tag (resulting in broken HTML)
4- Fixed many other small issues

Stuff still to do:
1- Unsubscribe option to go out inside the emails so users can unsubscribe from the email
2- Better subscription admin management
3- Find out where the hell the messagebox goes to (after sending emails from newsletter, the status box seems to go to mysterious places)

Let me know what else.

Upgrade instructions.

Because the Emails are pre-cached, changes to styles, templates, module layouts etc... do not affect previous versions unless you choose to refresh or rebuild layouts. With the new inline style tools, you will need to follow these steps:


Download latest package from license manager
Unzip and upload entire contents of the forums folder to your forums directory. Overwrite existing files
Go to your product manager and import the product-gaz.xml file (choose to override the existing install)
refresh your admincp
go to your gaz settings page and make sure all of the info is right (upgrades seem to be overwriting settings). Save either way.
Make sure you revert your gaz_HTML templates if you changed them
Go to the inline style tools section of the GAZ admincp.
Select each style and load its corresponding CSS data.
Save each one
Go to admincp->gaz->tools and choose to rebuild all layouts
New install instructions.

Download latest package from license manager
Unzip and upload entire contents of the forums folder to your forums directory.
Go to your product manager and import the product-gaz.xml file
refresh your admincp
go to your gaz settings page and make sure all of the info is right. Save either way.
Go to the inline style tools section of the GAZ admincp.
Select each style and load its corresponding CSS data.
Save each one
Read the documentation!
Inline style tools

since many email reader strip out the header and css info to varying degrees, GAZ lets you mve some of the style definitions inline. This produces larger output files, but makes the email look far more attractive on a variety of readers. The only ones you can currently set are the most commonly used.
When using the tool, you can choose to auto-load most key definitions however there are limitations to what can be loaded. Feel free to adjust them as you want to meet your needs.
If you do not want the style to be put inline, simply leave the setting blank.

Remember that hotmail and gmail will strip out images from css definitions (even if the user selects to download all images).

Please leave this thread for discussing the release. Open new threads in this forum to troubleshoot and place bugs in the tracker.

As always, read the documentation (http://www.thevbgeek.com/geeki)!

Darat
05-19-2007, 04:28 PM
(I'm posting this here not as a bug report as it may be something I'm doing wrong.)

Just upgraded to RC3b, created the extra inline style info and rebuilt the layouts.

In Outlook 2003 the layout is slightly screwed up, I've put several modules to the right but the tables widths are bit skew width (see attached jpegs).

Also the Newsletter appears to be formatted at a very wide fixed width, but the ones you've sent from thevbgeek seem not to be a fixed width?

The Geek
05-19-2007, 09:03 PM
One looks like broken HTML. can you 'send a friend' email to vbgeek[at]thevbgeek.com for me to check out?

Hornstar6969
05-20-2007, 04:41 AM
started upgrade at 2.29pm finished upgrade at 2.33pm

1. all settings were removed. fixed them up in no time, but would be nice if they were not overwritten.
2. was a little confused about the inline tools, would be nice if that was done automatically, but i selected matching skin names, click on submit, then save, then repeated fore each skin. hope that was correct
3. i decided to delete the newsletters that i had already made, and wait for it to create one, because i made a newsletter last night, issue 1. then today it made issue 2. looks funny having a weekly newsletter a day apart lol. would have been better to be able to change the name from issue 2 to issue 1.

overall, cant wait to see how this one looks, i saw your test email, and it looked heaps nicer in gmail.

ps. I would love an option to send a newsletter to a specified username, email address, etc.

Thanks.

also, i only have issues show up in the top right hand corner, i dont have email to a friend and the other option that i see in yours.

The Geek
05-20-2007, 07:29 AM
The email to a friend is a usergroup setting :)

THanks for the feedback!

Darat
05-20-2007, 10:01 AM
One looks like broken HTML. can you 'send a friend' email to vbgeek[at]thevbgeek.com for me to check out?

On it's way.

Milad
05-20-2007, 09:08 PM
How can I made the plain text version as the default one?

The Geek
05-21-2007, 08:41 AM
Use the subscription tools in your admincp :)

Milad
05-23-2007, 07:44 PM
Unfortunately, I still got blank issues, also I had chosen to receive the plain text version of your newsletter, it arrives but there is no thread in it, just some words the name of the forum and link etc. try it.

Also the plain text version need to apply new line chars to it.
All lines seem to be one line.

Milad
05-25-2007, 02:11 PM
This is how your newsletter arrives:

No threads, and wrong Content-Type.


Delivered-To: myemail@gmail.com
Received: by 10.114.59.15 with SMTP id h15cs280348waa;
Thu, 24 May 2007 17:51:00 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.67.27.15 with SMTP id e15mr2517299ugj.1180054259661;
Thu, 24 May 2007 17:50:59 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <apache@samuelsweet.com>
Received: from server1.samuelsweet.com ([83.138.166.117])
by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 72si2938096ugb.2007.05.24.17.50.59;
Thu, 24 May 2007 17:50:59 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 83.138.166.117 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of apache@samuelsweet.com)
Received: from server1.samuelsweet.com (localhost [127.0.0.1])
by server1.samuelsweet.com (8.13.1/8.13.1) with ESMTP id l4P0ow0k023435
for <myemail@gmail.com>; Fri, 25 May 2007 01:50:58 +0100
Received: (from apache@localhost)
by server1.samuelsweet.com (8.13.1/8.13.1/Submit) id l4P0ow7N023432;
Fri, 25 May 2007 01:50:58 +0100
Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 01:50:58 +0100
To: myemail@gmail.com
Subject: Daily Test #26
From: "Geek Gazette" <geek@thenailgeek.com>
Message-ID: <200705250058.5968c0584322@www.thevbgeek.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: GAZ via vBulletin Mail via PHP



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The Geek
05-25-2007, 02:37 PM
Its all been addressed for next release:

http://www.thevbgeek.com/project.php?issueid=13
http://www.thevbgeek.com/project.php?issueid=10