Newsletter email subscribers

[meysam81]

Hey, great people,

It goes without saying that you're doing an awesome job.

I wonder if there is anyway we can grow a newsletter and asking people for their emails; one which will be used to push new posts right into their inbox.

I have seen Adding buttons.

I have also seen this discussion in this repository.

Yet, I am not sure how this functionality works. Do you, e.g., use ConvertKit or something similar to get their emails? And what happens after that? Do you mkdocs build the docs and use offline plugin to send one HTML file to their inbox? Do you manipulate the DOM in a customized way? Would you say that Mailchimp does this out of the box?

I'm a bit unclear as to how to grow a newsletter with email subscribers the same way you'd have in platforms like Medium or Substack.

Much appreciated in advance.

[kamilkrzyskow]

Hello @meysam81,
I don't have experience with neither growing a mailing list nor using Medium/Substack, but I might be able to point you in the right direction or at least start the discussion 😅

1. As far, as I know Material for MkDocs has no newsletter and the buttons in the docs are simply example of generic call to actions.
   I also think that providing more explicit instructions on how to grow a mailing list is outside of the project's scope. However, I can see your point that people might migrate from other blogging platforms here, and might expect a swap-in solution for newsletters.

2. In the discussion you mentioned Tim Vink talks about his MailChimp integration, we can see the rendered blog and the source code here:

   • https://timvink.nl/blog/
   • https://github.com/timvink/personal-site/blob/main/docs/blog/index.md?plain=1

   We can see that's a HTML form which sends data to a specific web address, he got (I'm assuming) from his MailChimp account dashboard form action="https://timvink.us20.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?..., so that's how he gets the emails.
   If you want to get more info about what happens next, just ping Tim in this thread. You likely can schedule weekly posts that will be sent to the list.
   Based on his call to action "Get notified of new posts" I would assume his list sends a generic message like "Tim Vink posted a new article titled ... -> go see the website <-" and funnels the readers back to the website.

   Would you say that Mailchimp does this out of the box?

   Your idea might also be correct, as web scraping isn't that complicated, so they could offer an option to scrape your own site and send it as an email without you having to crank the knobs.

3. I would expect the mailing list manager service to provide some templates for your newsletter. However, it would likely be best to match the look of the website, so it also has to accept some sort* of HTML files as your content. The issue is that the offline plugin likely won't help here, as it only changes some things to make sure that the website is "functional" when running from the filesystem. It still has relative paths to CSS/JavaScript assets, pages still contain the navigation tree, and it still loads the search bar.
   *So I think you would need to define a custom template file, similar to the home.html override template, but for an article that will be posted to your newsletter. This template would need to force absolute direct URLs to your assets, remove navigation items and unnecessary JavaScript, it should be a plain HTML page styled same as your actual blog page. Just copy the base.html and modify it until you get a satisfactory result.

*I can imagine some sort of security/optimization measure that doesn't allow customization of the email HTML structure too much, and only allows to style the structure provided by the mailing list manager, so best to check the capabilities before diving into custom template creation.

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Sorry for the lack of specifics, and I hope my rambling helped you in some way.

[timvink]

Hello, Tim here :)

Setting up email subscriptions to a static site is something completely separate from mkdocs. There are two components basically:

1. Collecting email addresses. I used a form supplied by Mailchimp, and improved the layout a bit using HTML/CSS
2. Triggering email campaigns to your subscribers. I setup Mailchimp to check every night my website's RSS feed, and send out the newest post as an email.

To get the RSS feed from my mkdocs-material blog, I used the mkdocs RSS plugin.

Good luck!