JINC

JINC (Joomla! Integrated Newsletters Component) is a easy-to-use newsletter component for Joomla!. 


JINC includes these newsletter functionalities

• Basic Management - Creation and editing of unlimited number of newsletters.
• Profiling - Access restriction to a newsletter to guests, users or groups of users.
• Auto-subscription - Automatic newsletter subscription after Joomla! user registration.
• Welcome Message and Disclaimer - Welcome message after newsletter subscription and disclaimer automatically added to every newsletter message.
• Themes management - Several frontend themes available to show a newsletter in Joomla! frontend
• Template management - Definition of message templates to avoid copy and paste at every message creation.
• Content type management - Possibility to choose between plain text and HTML messages.
• Massime or personalized mails - One mail per subscriber or mails with a lot subscribers in Blind Carbon Copy.
• Multi Attachment - One or more attachments for messages.
• TAG substitution - Subscribers and newsletters info TAGs substituted while sending process.
• Start/Stop functionalities - Possibility to start the message sending process, pause it and re-start later
•  E-mail confirmation - Mail confirmation during subscription and unsubscription by opt-in messages.
• Massive import - Import subscriber lists from CSV files.
• Groups management - Creation of groups of potential subscribers for private newsletters.
• Joomla! Contact Integration - Possibility to retrieve subscribers information from Joomla! contacts
• Addictional attributes - Administrator definible mandatory or optional attributes to subscribe a newsletter
• Captcha confirmation - Activable captcha for newsletter subscription
• Event based statistics - Statistics registered based on events (subscription, unsubscription, message sent).
• Time based statitics - Statistics showed by time line.
• Statistics charts - Trend of events time based showed in a chart.
•  Frontend translations - Frontend translated in english, italian, french, spanish, german and dutch
• Backend translations - Backend translated in english and italian

JINC Main Page and Global Configuration

JINC 1.6 can be accessed by Joomla! administrator through the Component menù of Joomla! administration. The main page, as displayed in the following figure, allows to access every JINC functionalities and shows information about version, license and links to documentation and forum.

Using the main page you can also check your JINC version and the latest version available.

Using the icon Preferences of the JINC Main Page you can access the JINC global configuration that is useful to set general behariours of the comeponent. As you can see in the next figure, there are only few parameters to configure for JINC:

Newsletter Editing and Publishing

Information about a newsletter can be defined by the newsletter editing view as in figure

The data you must provide to define a newsletter depends on the newsletter type, but some information are common to every newsletter as

• Name. Newsletter name visible also in Joomla! frontend.
• Type. This value is not editable after newsletter creation.
• Newsletter subscription on user registration. If flag is checked JINC will subscribe every new Joomla! registered user to this newletter just after registration.
• Notification on subscription. If this flag is chedked JINC will send a notification message to Joomla! administrators every time someone subscribe this newsletter.
• Template. The default template loaded every time a new message is associated to this newsletter.
• Description. Newsletter description visible also in Joomla! frontend.
• Addresses. You can set sender information (name and mail address) and reply-to information (name and mail address). If no info are specified the default Joomla! mailing system information will be used.
• Frontend. Here you can choose how and how many messages to show in Joomla! frontend, what graphilcal theme must be used and if the subscription needs inserting a valid captcha code.
• Welcome Message. This is the message to send to an user after subscription to the newsletter. It can contain info about the newsletter, the unsubscription link and other.
• Opt-in messages. Title and body for subscription opt-in message and opt-in message used  to confirm the unsubscription request.
• Disclaimer. This text will be attached at the end of every newsletter message.

Moreover using the 'Attributes' tab you can define the addiction attibute to link to this newsletter. You can choose if an attribute is 'optional', 'mandatory' or 'not used' as in the next sample

For more details on Addictional attributes management see Appendix A. Addictional Attribute Management

The 'Frontend' tab determines the visualization and beaviour of the newletter in Joomla! frontend. The specific parameters are showed in next figure and explained here

Messages List

Using the Component → JINC → Messages menù item you can access the list of defined messages, as showed in the next figure.

The first message in our example (titled 'Hello everybody !!!') is related to the public newsletter and is a Bulk Message. With this kind of message the sending process will not send one mail for every subscribers, but few mails with a lot of recipients in Blind Carbon Copy (BCC.). The other messages are related to private newsletters and are Personal Messages.

From here you can see several info related to single messages. A very important message info is the status: a message can be in one of this status

• Stopped. The message was never sent by any administrator or the last sending process has been stopped.
• Paused. The last sending process has been paused. An administrator can replay the sending process beginning from the last contacted subscriber.
• Running. An administrator is sending the message to the subscriber. In this case another administrator can pause or stop the sending process (this will pause or stop the firtst administrator sending process), but can not play it.
• Finished. The message has been sent at least one time and the last sending process has reached the last subscriber.

If a message has been in 'finished' status at least one time, it has an history that can be visualized acting on the 'History' button.

Moreover this page shows the newsletter name which every message is related to, the last dispatch date and his unique identifier.

Newsletter Statistics

JINC comes with an event-driven statistical system.Every time someone subscribes or unsubscribes to a newsletter or an administrator sends a message JINC registers an event.

Then JINC uses these events to generate statistics so the administrator can follow the trends of number of subscriptions and message sendings. To access the newsletter statistics you can use the related icon in newsletter list as in figure

Using this icon you access the statistics page which can be used to show statistics about number of subscriptions, number of unsubscriptions and number of sent messages daily or hourly time based.

Here is an example of statistics page regarding the sample newsletter News for every Joomla! Users. The performed chart shows the number of subscriptions within the last 8 days.

You can congiure JINC to use two different systems to show newsletter statistical charts. The default one is openflash, an opensource chart system to show chart using flash tecnology. The other one is a built-in chart system producing images for chart display using native PHP graphical library (GD). See JINC Main Page and Global Configuration for more details.

A. Theme Management

JINC 0.7 adds the possibility to assign a frontend theme to a newsletter. A theme defines the graphical aspect of newsletter in Joomla! Frontend simply using a CSS file. JINC comes with three predefined and very simple themes: ice, red and blue. To define a new theme you must create a new css file in the directory
<JOOMLA_PATH>/components/com_jinc/assets/themes/
following the example of one of the default theme and ridefining the CSS classes contained in it. The newsletter editing functionality will list as a theme every file in the target directory with .css extension.

Appendix B. Addictional Attribute Management

JINC 0.7 introduces the possibility to define addictional attributes for newsletter subscription. An attibute, in this context, is a value an user must provide to subscribe a newsletter. In case of public newsletter, for example, mail address and name are necessary attributes for subscription.

The administrator can define addictional attributes and associate them to a newsletter as mandatory attribute (the subscriber must provide it) or optional attribute (the subscriber may provide).

The addictional attibute definition functioanlity can be accessed from the newsletter listing page with the button 'Attributes' and accessing to the addictional attribute management tool as next figure.

An addictional attribute is defined by these parameters:

1. Attribute name: the name of the attribute used to refer to it around the JINC application.
2. Input name: the string used in the subscription form in Joomla! Frontend. For internationalizion purposes, this string can be translated in the JINC frontend language files (i.e.: <JOOMLA_PATH>/language/en-GB/en-GB.com_jinc.ini)
3. Tag name: the string describing the attribute during message editing for tag substitution purpose. This string must is not editable by administrator and must be translated in JINC backend language files (i.e.: <JOOMLA_PATH>/language/en-GB/en-GB.com_jinc.ini).
4. Input type: it can be Integer or String and is used to check input during user subscription request.
5. Description. The attribute description.

Once defined, an attribute can be associated to one or more newsletter as a mandatory or optional attribute through the panel in the editing the newsletter page.

The value of attribute associated to the newsletter will be request in the subscription form and the input value will be checked based on the attribute input type and his obligatoriness. For example, associating the attribute surname as mandatory and address as optional the subform request will appear like this

and in message editor has the dispobility of the addictional tags [ATTR_ADDRESS] and [ATTR_SURNAME].