Newsletters

Bedrock includes support for signing up for and managing subscriptions and preferences for Mozilla newsletters.

Many pages have a form to signup for the default newsletters, “Mozilla Foundation” and “Firefox & You”.

Features

• Ability to subscribe to a newsletter from a web form. Many pages on the site might include this form.

• Whole pages devoted to subscribing to one newsletter, often with custom text, branding, and layout

• Newsletter preference center - allow user to change their email address, preferences (e.g. language, HTML vs. text), which newsletters they’re subscribed to, etc. Access is limited by requiring a user-specific token in the URL (it’s a UUID). The full URL is included as a link in each newsletter sent to the user, which is the only way (currently) they can get the token.

• Landing pages that user ends up on after subscribing. These can vary depending on where they’re coming from.

Newsletters

Newsletters have a variety of characteristics. Some of these are implemented in Bedrock, others are transparent to Bedrock but implemented in the basket back-end that provides our interface to the newsletter vendor.

• Public name - the name that is displayed to users, e.g. “Firefox Weekly Tips”.

• Internal name- a short string that is used internal to Bedrock and basket to identify a newsletter. Typically these are lowercase strings of words joined by hyphens, e.g. “firefox-tips”. This is what we send to basket to identify a newsletter, e.g. to subscribe a user to it.

• Show publicly - pages like the newsletter preferences center show a list of unsubscribed newsletters and allow subscribing to them. Some newsletters aren’t included in that list by default (though they are shown if the user is already subscribed, to let them unsubscribe).

• Languages - newsletters are available in a particular set of languages. Typically when subscribing to a newsletter, a user can choose their preferred language. We should try not to let them subscribe to a newsletter in a language that it doesn’t support.

  The backend only stores one language for the user though, so whenever the user submits one of our forms, whatever language they last submitted is what is saved for their preference for everything.

• Welcome message - each newsletter can have a canned welcome message that is sent to a user when they subscribe to it. Newsletters should have both an HTML and a text version of this.

• Drip campaigns - some newsletters implement so-called drip campaigns, in which a series of canned messages are dribbled out to the user over a period of time. E.g. 1 week after subscribing, they might get message 1; a week later, message 2, and so on until all the canned messages have been sent.

  Because drip campaigns depend on the signup date of the user, we’re careful not to accidentally change the signup date, which could happen if we sent redundant subscription commands to our backend.

Bedrock and Basket

Bedrock is the user-facing web application. It presents an interface for users to subscribe and manage their subscriptions and preferences. It does not store any information. It gets all newsletter and user-related information, and makes updates, via web requests to the Basket server.

The Basket server implements an HTTP API for the newsletters. The front-end (Bedrock) can make calls to it to retrieve or change users’ preferences and subscriptions, and information about the available newsletters. Basket implements some of that itself, and other functions by calling the newsletter vendor’s API. Details of that are outside the scope of this document, but it’s worth mentioning that both the user token (UUID) and the newsletter internal name mentioned above are used only between Bedrock and Basket.

URLs

Here are a few important URLs implemented. These were established before Bedrock came along and so are unlikely to be changed.

/newsletter/ - subscribe to ‘mozilla-and-you’ newsletter (public name: “Firefox & You”)

/newsletter/existing/USERTOKEN/ - user management of their preferences and subscriptions

Configuration

Currently, information about the available newsletters is configured in Basket. See Basket for more information.

Footer signup

Customize the footer signup form by overriding the email_form template block. For example, to have no signup form:

{% block email_form %}{% endblock %}

The default is:

{% block email_form %}{{ email_newsletter_form() }}{% endblock %}

which gives a signup for Firefox & You. You can pass parameters to the macro email_newsletter_form to change that. For example, the newsletters parameter controls which newsletter is signed up for, and title can override the text:

{% block email_form %}
    {{ email_newsletter_form('app-dev',
                             'Sign up for more news about the Firefox Marketplace.') }}
{% endblock %}

The newsletters parameter, the first positional argument, can be either a list of newsletter IDs or a comma separated list of newsletters IDs:

{% block email_form %}
    {{ email_newsletter_form('mozilla-foundation, mozilla-and-you') }}
{% endblock %}

Pages can control whether country or language fields are included by passing include_language=[True|False] and/or include_country=[True|False].