Installing S&D with 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 buildout that's built and ready to run.

1. Edit your buildout.cfg file and look for the eggs key in the instance section. Add collective.dancing to that list. Your list will look something like this:

   eggs =
       ${buildout:eggs}
       ${plone:eggs}
       collective.dancing
   

   In the same section, look for the zcml key. Add collective.dancing here, too:

   zcml = collective.dancing
   

2. Still in your buildout configuration file, look for the [zope2] section (which uses the plone.recipe.zope2install recipe), and add the following lines to it:

   fake-zope-eggs = true
   additional-fake-eggs = ZODB3
   skip-fake-eggs =
       zope.testing
       zope.component
       zope.i18n
       zope.sendmail
   

3. Now that we're done editing the buildout configuration file, we can run buildout again:

   $ ./bin/buildout -v
   

4. 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.

   Should these instructions not work for you, contact us.

It's installed. What's next?

You'll now have an entry in the control panel to Singing & Dancing. This will lead you to to the advanced configuration panel of S&D.

Note that there's already a default newsletter set up for your convenience. You can create a Channel subscribe portlet to enable your users to subscribe to this channel, or you can point them to http://yoursite/portal_newsletters/channels/default-channel/subscribe.html

To send out a newsletter, go to any portal object, like the Plone front page, and click Actions -> Send as newsletter.

The advanced configuration panel of S&D gives you many more ways to send newsletters, like periodically and from automatically collected content.

Processing the message queue

One important thing to note is that S&D usually queues messages in its own message queue before sending them out. You might have noticed that when you send out a newsletter, S&D tells you that it queued the messages.

In a production setup, you would normally process the message queue periodically using the built-in Zope ClockServer. While you're testing, you can visit the Statistics screen in the S&D advanced configuration panel and manually flush the queues. If your mail configuration in Plone is set up correctly, you should be sending mail out now.

To set up ClockServer to trigger the processing automatically for you, add this stanza to the Zope 2 instance section of your buildout configuration and rerun bin/buildout -v:

zope-conf-additional =
    <clock-server>
      method /portal/@@dancing.utils/tick_and_dispatch
      period 300
      user admin
      password admin
      host localhost
    </clock-server>

This will process the message queue every five minutes. It assumes that your Plone site is called portal and that your username and password are admin.

Note: You must not set up this ClockServer on more than one instance. The processing makes sure it's not invoked twice at the same time by using file locking.

Configuring zope.sendmail to send out messages

Singing & Dancing uses zope.sendmail to send out its mail. S&D comes with a default configuration for zope.sendmail in its collective/dancing/mail.zcml file. This configuration will read SMTP parameters from your Plone site.

Be warned however, that this default configuration is not suitable for high-volume newsletters. The aforementioned configuration file contains an example configuration using mail:queuedDelivery that works much more reliable when dealing with a large number of mails.