Greetings and Salutations!

The Newsletter Scheduler is now ready for some testing! Thank you so much to the management team for helping me get this set up for you in time for the holidays!

The most important thing to emphasize here is THE OLD MAILER WORKS THE WAY IT ALWAYS HAS. If you are busy with the holidays and don't want to worry about learning anything new right now, that is fine! Use the old interface, it hasn't been touched at all. You can poke into this new area after the holidays are over, when you have some free time.

For editors who DO want to play with the new interface, and start scheduling their newsletters to future-publish just like their articles future-publish, here are the easy instructions!

1) On your admin menu, use "Edit Newsletter Info". Set the day and time you'd like your newsletters to come out. Note that setting these values doesn't "do anything"! Newsletters won't start flying out of the system on their own :) So feel free to change / play with this page as much as you want to see how it works. It is just setting up some starting values.

2) On your admin menu, use "Newsletter Scheduler". This shows you all newsletters that are currently scheduled for your site. Because we are just setting this up, it is currently set to operate in a VERY simple way :) That way we can test it and make sure it's working properly. So it starts by letting you add the next newsletter that's coming up, based on the day/time you entered in step 1. It lets you add that with an "Add Scheduled Newsletter" link.

3) When you click on "Add Scheduled Newsletter", you get a page that looks just like your old "send a newsletter right now" page. That is, you have a subject field, a main text field, and a TEXT/HTML toggle choice. You fill those three fields in like you've always done in the past, customizing it as much as you wish. The difference is that when you hit "Save to Schedule" at the bottom, it now saves it to send out at a FUTURE date. It doesn't send it right away.

Voila! That's it! Now your newsletter is in the schedule, and will be sent at the date / time you requested! You can edit that newsletter as much as you want right up until it's sent out.

You can then add the next newsletter in order, and so on - adding in as many future-dated newsletters as you wish!

Please let Lesley, our Newsletter Help manager, know if you have any questions, suggestions, or comments about this new interface! She is at newsletterhelp@bellaonline.com and is our contact person for this new system.

This system is brand new and is set up in a very basic format right now, so we can test and play with it. I'm sure there's a lot of room for enhancements and improvements! Just let Lesley know what we can do to make it easier to use, and we'll make up a list to work on!

Thank you so much for your patience while I coded this system up! I hope you find the scheduling ability useful to help streamline your world!



Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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