One of the sites I am setting up requires that all users be subscribed to a certain newsletter (or maybe two, depending on who they are) via Simplenews when they create their accounts (actually, their accounts are automatically created via LDAP... but that's another story).
Looking around, I found this post explaining how you might be able to auto-subscribe new users, and it led me to look up Simplenews' simplenews_subscribe_user() function.
Basically, you can add a line like the following in your custom module's hook_user() function, on the 'insert' $op (for Drupal 6):
<?php
// simplenews_subscribe_user(<email>, <tid_of_newsletter>, <send_confirmation_email_boolean>, <source_of_subscription>, <language>)
simplenews_subscribe_user($account->mail, 45, $confirm = FALSE, $source = 'action', NULL);
?>Additionally, you can subscribe ALL of your site's users (or whatever subset you choose, via your own logic) to a Simplenews newsletter using the following PHP snippet (you can just paste this in Devel's 'Execute PHP Code' block):
<?php
$uids_to_update = array(0, 1, 2);
foreach ($uids_to_update as $uid) {
$account = user_load($uid);
simplenews_subscribe_user($account->mail, 45, $confirm = FALSE, $source = 'action', NULL);
}
?>I grabbed a list of all the active uids on the site using views, turned them into an array (used quick regex in TextMate to turn a line-broken list into value, value, value...), then used the code above (with my own array in it) to subscribe all active users to the newsletter.
Comments
See also, my post on how I am using Simplenews to handle emailing weekly notifications programmatically (allowing me to scaled to hundreds/thousands of users (something I was unable to do with Rules, due to PHP's timeout).
Nice write-up Jeff. I do have one question though: is it necessary to call user_load() for each user? Supposing you have several hundred thousand users, this could take a very long time to complete. As far as I can see, given the user's uid, we just need the email address to pass to simplenews_subscribe_user() so maybe a simple SELECT mail FROM users WHERE uid = %d might be quicker?
That would be an excellent optimization; for my purposes, I only had a couple hundred users, so doing a
user_load()didn't kill me. (I have one site where some of the pages do full node_loads() over three hundred times per page load... but there was no other/better way, so we cache those pages :).I could not get this code to work but found that simplenews comes with a simplenews actions submodule that works well. Simply set up a new action to subscribe a new user to the newsletter, then a trigger to do the action when a new user is created.
That will definitely work, too... I just haven't used the actions/trigger modules in so long...
You can just set up a new action to automatically subscribe a new user to your newsletter which can be triggered to do the action when a new user is created.
Here a exemple of rules action to subscrite each new user to specified simplenews id:
<?phpfunction demo_rules_subscribe_user_tag_form($settings, &$form){
$settings += array('newsids' => '');
$form['settings']['newsids'] = array(
'#type' => 'textfield',
'#title' => t('News ids'),
'#default_value' => $settings['newsids'],
'#description' => t('Please enter each news id separate by comma.'),
);
return $form;
}
function demo_rules_action_info() {
$items=array();
$items['demo_rules_subscribe_user_tag'] = array(
'label' => t('Subscribe a user to a news'),
'arguments' => array(
'node' => array('type' => 'user', 'label' => t('user'))
),
'module' => 'Notifications',
'eval input' => array('uid'),
);
return $items;
}
function demo_rules_subscribe_user_tag($user, $settings) {
$newsids=explode("," ,$settings["newsids"]);
foreach($newsids as $newsid){
simplenews_subscribe_user($user->mail, trim ($newsid), $confirm = FALSE);
}
}
?>