Sending an item to multiple newsletters

Motivation

Sending a single content item to multiple newsletters would be a very useful feature. It enables a site to have different newsletters that visitors can subscribe to - for example for different roles or different interests - and then the site owners can send content items that are relevant to more than one interest or role without needing to create duplicate content items. Furthermore, subscribers that are on more than one of the target newsletters should only receive a single copy of the email.

Simplenews does currently not allow a single content item to be sent to multiple newsletters; if one attempts to work around this by cloning items with Rules, duplicate emails would get sent to subscribers on both lists.

Proposed solution

Various options...

Multi-valued simplenews_issue field

We would leave the issue field as single-value by default, but fix the code to work if the site-admin alters the cardinality (can do in the normal way through the field settings GUI).

• Fix SpoolStorage to add a loop, and clever SQL code to avoid duplicates.
• The catch with this option is that we now have multiple status/count/handler settings fields. This will need careful handling in the UI (NodeTabForm and SendStatus).

Patch #31 is a start towards this, but has problems described in #39.

New entity type for simplenews_issue

Instead of a simplenews_issue field we could have a separate simplenews_issue entity type. This can have a multi-valued entity reference field but still stick with a single copy of status and count. This would also solve #3053111: Issue status should not be stored on issue entity → .

RecipientHandler

Create RecipientHandlerMultiple as described in #40 but it has flaws described in #42.