Lesser Known Drupal Module - Views Send
Views Send Module
In this blog post, I would like to cover a lesser-known and yet powerful Drupal module - Views send. As the name implies the module works on top of the awesome query builder and output formatter Views and VBO modules to send a tokenized piece of text to the e-mail address field value in view output. Optionally it can send HTML e-mail if the Mime Mail module is available.
The maintainer of the Views Send module Claudiu.Cristea describes the module as
Views Send allow sending mass mailing using Views Bulk Operations.
How it works?
- Create a view and add at least one column containing E-mail addresses.
- [Optional] Expose Views filters to let the user easily build list of recipients using UI.
- Create a "Page" display and set the Style to "Bulk Operations".
- On "Bulk Operations" Style configuration, under "Selected operations", select
Send mass mail (views_send_mail_action).- Save the view, load the page, use exposed filters to build the list, select all or some rows and choose "Send mass mail".
- Fill the message form to configure the E-mail. Use tokens to personalize your E-mail. The module provide also row-based tokens, taken from the current row of the view. For example, if the view has a column with the key
users_name(the user name) you can use this replacement token[views-send-users_name].- Preview and send the message.
Note: Messages are queued in a spool table and will are delivered only on cron. You can control how many messages will be send per cron run.
In brief, it says everything about the module and how to get started. Views Send puts together the advantage of views and core cron to send any large number of emails from within Drupal. This module is really a boon for the requirements that involve email marketing and advertisement.
We have been working to enhance this module to introduce CC and BCC headers with token support and fix other known potential bugs for our client. Looking forward to contributing the code back to the community.