Helloindie
May 30th, 2006 | Published in Professional Projects | 2 Comments
Helloindie is a biweekly email zine about the DIY craft revolution. It began its life designed to be a print publication, but with limited funding available and the magazine market tightening, I decided it would be prudent to redirect efforts to an online product.
Being an ezine allows the magazine to grow at a more natural pace, letting us explore the vibrant DIY craft scene (a moniker denoting its difference from the traditional American craft movement) at our own pace.
I built the backend using open source applications, including DADA Mail and Wordpress. I customized Wordpress to serve as a magazine-style newsletter generator, after not finding suitable newsletter creation options out in the market. This way, I get to leverage the powerful multiuser environment of Wordpress to write and edit articles, while having custom control over the newsletter template, from images to colors. I can also easily update template design if I want. Once I’m ready to publish out a newsletter, I simply copy and paste the generated code into DADA Mail and send it.
It seems somewhat complicated, but I find that complexity often leads to the simplest solution.
June 1st, 2006 at 1:05 am (#)
This is supremely awesome. I may spotlight you on the Dada Mail site – may I?
July 18th, 2007 at 9:14 am (#)
This is very very cool and pretty close to what I’ve been looking for for a volunteer project I’m working on for a church/school. We’re trying to find a way to get the print-based newsletter online for the website and Wordpress sounds like the way to go. I have no experience yet with the product. However, we don’t want to have to maintain two separate newsletters – one online and one for print. The secretaries currently do it in MS Publisher. I like the idea of having all the content contributors being able to send their articles directly to the site, but what about all our shut-ins who don’t have computers? We still need a print format for them.
Do you have a way to create a separate style sheet that would, say, pull all content submitted in a given month, or within a certain period of time, in a format that could be printed (in two or three column format) for mailing or distribution?
If not, how much would you charge to create a plugin for Wordpress to do such a thing? Or to create a style sheet formatted to print? If you wish, I could scan one of our newsletters and put it in a PDF to send to you as an example so you can see how we’d like it to look.
Thanks!