Hi, I bought a Wordpress website from the family of an unfortunately deceased developer. It works together with phplist. Every day a newsletter is send with the posts of the day before. It also contains some links of other messages. Perfect, but I can’t find out how it works and how I can affect it without causing damage. It’s a standard template with [content]. Does anybody have an idea where I can find out how [content] is generated? I can’t find a plugin in de Wordpress website that does the job. Thanks a lot!
@beveiligingnieuws Look at one of the messages that has been sent using the template. There are a couple of possibilities
- the message content is fetched as a wordpress page. In this case a remote url will have been specified
- the content is fetched as an rss feed.
Hi Duncanc, thanks very much for your reply. I am affraid that it is very complex. The template is simple. The mystery is the shortcode [content]. I know that every phplist newsletter should contain this shortcode, but I can’t find out how the content is generated. Perhaps there are other people with a phplist installation that can also select all the Wordpress posts of the day before. Kind regards, beveiligingnieuws
@beveiligingnieuws Usually a phplist campaign message has two parts - the template, which has the overall layout of the message but no actual content, and separately the message content. The idea is that you can use the same template for many campaigns. The template has a placeholder,[content], which is replaced by the message content when phplist constructs the email.
You appear to be looking at the template but I asked you to also look at the campaigns that are using that template. Go to menu Campaigns > List of campaigns.
As I explained phplist has some ways of retrieving the campaign content from wordpress. It can get the message content by fetching a specific wordpress page or by using an RSS feed (that is produced automatically by wordpress https://beveiligingnieuws.nl/feed). You will need to find a campaign that has used the template to see how that is done.
Hi Duncanc, thanks again for your support. I followed your advice and found out that the list of campaigns only contains monthly campaigns that are made manually. They use the same template as the daily newsletter, that is generated automatically. I found the html of the daily newsletters in the history table of the database. I guess that’s normal. Everyday a new record with html is generated. The challenge now is to find out how. I am almost sure that some (hard to find) program gets the posts and other stuff out of the Wordpress database. I could not find a plugin in Wordpress that does the job and also on wordpress.org/plugins I could not find a plugin that does the same, although it is an extreme convenient feature. I will keep you informed. Kind regards, Vincent
@beveiligingnieuws It sounds like there might have been some customisation made to phplist, or a separate program that accesses the wordpress and phplist databases. If a program is run daily then it might be setup as a cron job. Your system admin should be able to check that for you.