Tendenci Help Files

1. Web Marketing
   • Search Engine Marketing benefits: your tendenci-optimized content can be found in the search engines and increase traffic to your web site
   • Newsletter Distribution can be used with a live Tendenci site
   • You can drive traffic to your site from Social Sites with friendly URL’s
   • Your new web site powered by Tendenci is better looking than before
   • Tendenci web sites are user-friendly web sites  - your site users will explore your site with ease
2. User/Member base generation
   • Collection of contacts online through contact forms, newsletter signup, User and Membership registration
3. Online transactions
   • Membership dues can be collected online easily
   • Ability to have Calendar Event registration with payment is supported
   • Users and members can pay you for job postings
   • Online Donations can be made to your organization/company
   • You can charge for business directory listings
4. Return on your Monthly Tendenci Investment
   • Your Sucess is Our Success - You are paying for Tendenci even before you go live.  Get your return on investment sooner. 
   • Don’t let one or 2 pages of content hold you from taking your site online. Your website should grow and change with time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

• An overview of your company
• What you would like to accomplish with the new site
• Ideas for the new navigation
• Ideas for the new designs (on all full design projects)
• Modules you may be using
• Important technical or online payment information

 

 

 

 

 

 

Are you confused by all the icons in the WYSIWYG?  Well, who wouldn't be really?  Here is an exhaustive list of the meanings of all the icons in the WYSIWYG! Are you ready?

1. Add the article that will need a podcast attached
1. Please do add text with good keywords as search engines can not read audio files but they *can read text.
2. It is a good idea to have your podcast transcribed so the audio will be converted as text. There are many online audio transcription companies to use. Here’s one: http://castingwords.com/
2. After you add your article, you need to upload the podcast to the article.
3. Once the article is submitted, from the confirmation page, click View the article from the bulleted list
   
   
4. From the view page, use the file upload icon to upload your MP3
5. From the upload file page, browse to the the file on your computer and hit upload file.
6. Once the file uploads, edit the article and scroll down in the edit view to Podcast Capable Media shows up in RSS Enclosure URL for PodCasting
7. Under that select option 1. The MP3 should appear from the drop down.  Select it and hit update article at the bottom and your MP3 should appear.
   (Option 1 only works if the files is smaller than 10MB) If the file has been FTP’ed into the site live server you would select option 2 but would need the *path URL for option2.

When an Email notification, Contact Form Submission or Newsletter is sent from your Tendenci site, it will now have a sender address of DO-NOT-REPLY-TENDENCI@schipul.net. This email address matches the address of the mail server that is being used to process and send your emails - which looks more legitimate to other mail servers, resulting in increased deliveries.

What are you talking about?

Old Way:
To a server, the following sample email header could look like Spam as it is sent with the sender's own email address from a Tendenci site's newsletter generator (@hotmail.com vs. @schipul.net):

Return-Path: mdinkleplotz@hotmail.com
Sender: mdinkleplotz@hotmail.com
From: "Mary Dinkleplotz" <mdinkleplotz@hotmail.com>
Subject: My organization's newsletter!

New and Improved Way:
By changing the 'Sender' path, your email will appear less suspicious as the sender address matches your Tendenci site's mail server that is being used to send the email (@schipul.net):

Return-Path: DO-NOT-REPLY-TENDENCI@schipul.net
Sender: DO-NOT-REPLY-TENDENCI@schipul.net
From: "Mary Dinkleplotz" <mdinkleplotz@hotmail.com>
Subject: My Organization's Newsletter

How does this affect me?

If I were sending a newsletter to you from the Tendenci website, you would receive my Newsletter in your inbox and the "Sender" would be DO-NOT-REPLY-TENDENCI@schipul.net (this is generally not displayed by the email application).

The "From and/or Reply To” address will continue to have the email address of the user who was specified in the ReplyTo field pictured below:

You must be sure to include your correct address in the 'ReplyTo' field (see below) to ensure email replies are sent to your email address. Otherwise, they will be sent to the DO-NOT-REPLY-TENDENCI@schipul.net and will not make it to your inbox, which would be sad.  The helpfile to edit this information is located at How Do I Customize the Sender Display in an Email?

The Good News:

This mandatory update was made specifically to help improve your email deliverability.  It also makes your email compliant with regulations outlined here: http://www.openspf.org/Best_Practices/Webgenerated

We strongly recommend that you do not change this variable as YOUR EMAIL DELIVERY RATES WILL DROP IF YOU REVERT BACK!

If you are having issues with Spam on your site and Schipul has enabled CAPTCHA already, you can go to the emails section of the web site to block email addresses. To do this:

        1. Log into your Tendenci site.
        2. From the Tendenci console, click on Manage Users in the Admin Quick Links area.

        3. Look for Letter J. Email Utilities
        4. Click Number 2.) Email Blocks

        5. Choose Add an Email Block
        6. Enter the email address and email domain you wish to block. 
        7. Add a reason for the block (this is helpful information for administrator)
        8. Hit Submit.

The way it works:

When an email is sent from a Tendenci site (whether you are sending a newsletter to your users or a notification is being sent to you from the site) Tendenci goes through a function to send the email, it checks the email block list before any email is sent. If someone is listed on the email block list for your site, Tendenci will stop sending the email to that person and move on to the next email in the queue.

If the spam is coming from the contact form, Tendenci will still respond to the spammer by sending them to the contact confirmation page like it would any other person. Hackers go through a long period of research and testing before they actually try to breach the system so we don’t want to give them any indication that they are doing something wrong and causing us to block their email. The difference is that you will not receive contact form confirmations from this person.

When you send a newsletter through Tendenci, it does not report how many people read that newsletter. This is by design.

The main reason we do NOT track email opens in Tendenci is because we do not like it when people snoop on us. There it is.

The logical reasons to not track email opens (also the reasons to explain to your boss):

1. Bad data. Bad data is worse than no data. You can't accurately record email opens because recording email opens is done typically two ways neither of which is accurate.
   
   1. Request the mail server to send a receipt. Most mail servers have this turned off as a spam deterrent.
      
   2. Hidden graphic in the email. Sometimes called a "web bug". This is the most common method of recording email opens.
      
2. Web bugs (see 1.2 above) increase the email spam score for an email reducing actual deliveries.
   
3. Web bugs don't work on services that cache graphics like AOL unless you use a separate image for each user. That is technically possible but still doesn't work on text email readers like a Blackberry. (So your business users show 100% not read! Probably not what you wanted.)
   
4. No method of correction – by this I mean you can’t estimate how many false opens you get so you can’t do an increase of 50% or similar. So there is no rule-of-thumb correction for your bad data. See number 1 above.
   
   
5. Tracking URLs in email are more spammy and more likely to trigger spam filters reducing delivery rates. So the more you try to track the LESS likely they will actually read it.
   
   
6. Emails have a way of being reposted as content. So you post an email newsletter as an article so folks can access it later. Therefore ALL links in that article are tracking, which leads to spiders following the links which again corrupts your data. And removes link love from the targets because page rank is not transferred through tracking URLs
   
7. Tracking urls are ugly. We believe people are less likely to click ugly urls.

This leads to the famous Disraeli quote “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

When speaking to groups I ask "how many people want to know how many people read their newsletter?" and 50 to 60% of the room will say YES. Then I ask "how many people like it when other people record when they open an email or not?" and 100% of the room will say NO. In other words, nobody likes it when people record their email opens.

So what is a webmaster to do to improve the newsletter? Use landing pages and look at variances in daily article reads before the newsletter, the day of, and the day after. Yes this is more work but it IS accurate and does not invade anyone's privacy.

I realize reasonable people can disagree on this. If you absolutely must try to collect data, accurate or not, you can export the usergroup and use a third party email provider like:

1. http://www.mailchimp.com/
   
2. http://email.exacttarget.com
3. http://www.constantcontact.com
4. Microsoft bCentral

To track page views for CMS page do the following:

1. Edit the CMS page
2. Hit show extra options
3. Scroll down to more options and check log page views:
   
   
4. Hit submit
   **Note that this is not checked by default so from the time it is checked page views will be logged.
5. To view page views report click the icon next to the pencil that looks like this:
6. Once the reports page opens click CMS ranked by views and that will give you a report of all CMS pages you are logging.

 

Tendenci currently supports the following Gateway / Merchant providers:

1. Authorizenet
2. Linkpoint
3. YourPay Connect
4. PayPal
5. Verisign Payflow Link
6. eProcessingNetwork

If you are interested in using a Gateway provider that is not currently supported by Tendenci, please contact us for implementation costs.

Also note that we do not recommend a specific provider or accept commissions from any merchant providers. It is best that our clients simply find the best solution at the lowest rate for them.  If you are a merchant provider you can underwrite integration costs and then it is up to you to work directly with your clients. We simply help with integrating Tendenci as needed.