What is it?

Singing & Dancing is the next generation newsletter Product for Plone. It's an out of the box solution that works without modification for most of your use cases. And should you find something that Singing & Dancing can't do, it's built to be easily extended via plug-ins using the Zope 3 Component Architecture.

Features

Modern and extensible

Singing & Dancing builds on the latest and greatest efforts in the Zope and Plone world. It makes heavy use of the excellent z3c.form library and the Zope 3 Component Architecture. This allows you to easily plug in and extend Singing & Dancing to fit your needs.

Well tested

An extensive suite of automated tests make Singing & Dancing exceptionally stable and reliable. We currently have 200+ tests. Singing & Dancing is not gonna leave you in the lurch!

Fully managable through the Plone interface

Singing & Dancing is fully usable out of the box. An extensive set of forms reachable through the configuration panel let you as the user configure many details of your newsletters, like when they're sent (periodically or manually), what is sent (through the use of the Smart Folder interface, or manually), and to whom.

Subscriptions

Singing & Dancing uses confirmed subscription, i.e. subscribers receive an e-mail to confirm their subscription. Users can subscribe via a standard subscription form that lists all available newsletters in the site, or through individual subscription forms, e.g. in portlets.

Guide

If you want to get an idea of what Singing & Dancing is capable of, visit our guide with screenshots. This guide will also help you find your way to setting up your first newsletter.

Installation

Installation of Singing & Dancing uses buildout. If you don't know what buildout is or how to create a buildout, follow this tutorial first.

These instructions assume that you already have a Plone 3.x buildout that's built and ready to run.

Singing & Dancing is available as Python eggs on PyPI.

To install Singing & Dancing, add it to your buildout by following these steps:

1. Edit your buildout.cfg file and look for the [buildout] section. Add an extends= option in that section like the following:

   [buildout]
   extends = https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/collective.dancing/buildout-extends/0.8.10.cfg
   parts =
       zope2
       ...
       ...

   Should you already have an extends= line, add the new line at the end of your existing extends files. For Plone 3.2.1, your [buildout] section might start like this:

   [buildout]
   extends =
       http://dist.plone.org/release/3.2.1/versions.cfg
       https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/collective.dancing/buildout-extends/0.8.7.cfg
   parts =
       zope2
       ...
       ...

2. Next, you'll need to add collective.dancing to the eggs and zcml options in your [instance] section. Which should then look like this:

   [instance]
   ...
   eggs =
       ${buildout:eggs}
       ...
       collective.dancing
   zcml =
       ...
       collective.dancing

3. Remove all additional-fake-eggs and skip-fake-eggs options from that same [zope2] section, if any. (This is so you don't overrride the ones defined in the S&D extends file that we added in step 1.)

Once you're done editing your buildout configuration, don't forget to run your buildout again before you start up Zope:

$ ./bin/buildout -v

That's it! You can now start up your Zope instance, and then install Singing & Dancing in your Plone site by visiting the Add-on Products site control panel.

zope-conf-additional =
    <clock-server>
      # plonesite is your plone path
      method /plonesite/@@dancing.utils/tick_and_dispatch
      period 300
      user admin
      password admin
      # You need your *real* host here
      host www.mysite.com
    </clock-server>

zope-conf-additional =
    <clock-server>
      # plonesite is your plone path
      # www.mysite.com your site url
      method /VirtualHostBase/http/www.mysite.com:80/plonesite/VirtualHostRoot/@@dancing.utils/tick_and_dispatch
      period 300
      user admin
      password admin
    </clock-server>

Upgrade

If you're upgrading your version of Singing & Dancing, it might be that you need to run an upgrade of the database. In the portal_setup tool in the ZMI, visit the Upgrades tab and run any available new upgrades for the collective.dancing:default profile.

Contact us

If you have a question, or comment, get in touch with us! Our mailing list is a good place to do so. If you find a bug, please let us know. We also have an IRC channel called #singing-dancing on Freenode.

Developers

Singing & Dancing is built from scratch to be extensible. All components described in the interfaces.py file in collective.singing are pluggable.

Developer documentation exists in the form of doctests and Zope 3 interfaces in the source tree. To check out the development buildout, type this into your terminal:

svn co http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/collective.dancing/trunk-buildout singing-dancing-dev

When the checkout is complete, you can find the doctests in *.txt files in the src/collective.singing/collective/singing/ and src/collective.dancing/collective/dancing/ directories. There's also a documentation area for use cases and manuals in src/collective.dancing/docs/.

The latest version of collective.dancing itself can also be found in the Subversion repository.

Get in touch with us if you need help or have comments. See the Contact us section.