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Email Newsletter Ready WordPress Template

Help. Seriously, help. WordPress doesn’t handle templates as nicely as MovableType does – which is a major problem for those of us who use either platform as a site-wide CMS. I need a “purifier” plugin developed to help me get around a gigantic problem.

We generate email newsletters from static pages (URLs), generated by templates and includes through MovableType. I need a simple way to call a WordPress template that:

  1. has been stripped of all rich data: JavaScript, iFrames, Flash, etc..
  2. pulls in all CSS to be rendered inline rather than via link.
  3. can have a unique header and/or footer element.
  4. is not indexed by the search engines.

I’d imagine this would be another template (or subset), though I don’t know how it would necessarily be called upon. For my purposes, I’d need to pull in data relative to dates (as in, render a purified page for content published on 2006/07/31). I’d also imagine that I can’t be the only one screaming for this feature. Any email newsletter brethren (or sistren) care to prove to me that email, indeed, is not quite dead yet?

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3 Comments

Never accept software updates through email – EVER. antivirus, email worm, virus Related Content: SWF Virus Addendum How to Get Your Ass Fired Dropping AT&T Wireless How to Handle Email Overload Lotus Of Borg (Inbox) The Ultimate Boot CD Email Newsletter Ready WordPress Template Got Voice? GotVoice. Emoticon Maniacs Spamblogging [IMG]

Why were you concerned about it being google indexed? Would that cause some sort of havoc with your newsletter plans? – ben @ http://rubyonrailsblog.com

Step 1: Build the template.

Create your own custom template that has all the features you speak of. I think you can do them all just with a custom template editor.

Step 2: Assign your new template as a query-based template

This lets you load a page based on a special feature of the query. I haven’t looked too deeply, but I imagine it could (or could be tuned to) respond to whatever query args you put in the URL, like “?BadAssRssTemplate=1&date=whatev”

http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development#Query-based_Templates

If you can’t get everything you need in step 1, then maybe some extra plugin work is needed. But try real hard on step 1, first.

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