How to build a Newsletter or Infoletter Concept
The concept of mail page allows to deliver content from you confluence instantly over mail to people outside of the application. This ensures updated knowledge but in case of of multiple groups and delivering more then one page with a mail most customer does not know this highlight that Mail Page supports also the capabilities ob manual maintained Newsletter based on blogs of Infoletter based on pages!
With this introduction we start directly into the “How can i build my Newsletter or Infoletter in Confluence”.
Prep - What do i need?
Mail Page (latest version installed)
Mail Page App License with active maintenance
Confluence macros “include page” and/or “excerpt” + “include excerpt” (ensure that these macros are not deactivated by administrators)
Step 1
First create a space which you will dedicate to the maintenance and creations of Newsletter or Infoletter you want to manage. When you space is created you should define the structure you want to use for your Newsletter/Infoletter. Depending on the topics you want to share and the groups you want to address, you should be able to define your first iteration of structure. In this example we will create two pages in our new space. One is called “Newsletter for employees” and the other page will be named “Newsletter for external customers”. The result will look like this:
Step 2
In this step we make enhance the usability of the creation process for the editors. We will use for that confluence standard functions:
Create from Template macro
Panel macro
Template feature of a confluence space
Of course you can enhance the look and feel options even more if you have access to 3rd Party Apps supporting styling optimizations!
The result will look like this:
Created template in the Newsletter space
Startpage of the new Newsletter space
Create from Template macro on the Sub-Pages
Step 3
Finally we start create our first Newsletter. We start by creating a Newsletter for employees. We navigate to the page Newsletter for employees and click on the button “Create Newsletter”. Our created template will be used and we will be moved to the editor. Now we select our News from confluence by including them with the “include page” macro from confluence. There is no limit of how much include page macro´s you can put into the new page.
Please consider that a page with too much content will also create a mail with very long scrolling time!
Now we can also put in some Details at the end to simulate a footer for the Newsletter mail we will send out. You can also enhance the mail details with e.g. contact data of user by using other macros like the “profile” macro from confluence.
THE END
Now we define a useful title like “Newsletter + DATE” and save the page. The result will inherit all included contents from confluence you have configured. We you use the send mail button, the whole page will be sent out to the group the editor will define.