• Web Design (WordPress, Joomla, etc.)

  Is it possable to email news or an update to your site?

  Posted by Ryan Steiner on April 14, 2008 at 2:22 am

  All right, so I have no idea if this is even possible, but I was wondering if there is any way to compose and email, send it to a specified email address and have a script/program/whatever receive that email and update a website based on the contents of that email.

  Here’s the issue, I’ve got a client who wants to be able to add new items to a page, but doesn’t know anything about HTML, FTPing, etc (and doesn’t want to learn). So, what I need is a way for him to add an item, with a separate body and subject that can show up in several places. I’d like him to be able to do something like this:

  1. Client sends email with the Subject “Today we started filming!” and the body of the email contains “On April 13th, 2008, we started filming our big movie. Hooray!”

  2. The program/script/whatever extracts the subject and puts “Today we started filming!” on it’s own line under a “NEWS” heading on the front page of the web site.

  3. The program/script/whatever then extracts the subject and body of the email and adds an entry to the news page with a header reading “Today we started filming!” and the message “On April 13th, 2008, we started filming our big movie. Hooray!” below that heading.

  If the email option is unrealistic, then is there some sort of blogging solution that might work for this? Ideally, I would not like to require the client to use a blogging site or software, but if that’s the way it has to be, then that’s the way it has to be. The important factors are that the solution be able to place content on several different pages and that everything looks consistent with the rest of the page. And most important of all is that it must be very easy for the client.

  Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

  Ryan Steiner replied 18 years, 3 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Abraham Chaffin

  April 14, 2008 at 2:49 pm

  Hey Ryan,

  Most the time anything you can think is possible, it’s just how to do it that’s the question =)
  So yes, this is very possible, and not all that hard really.
  The process might be a little different depending on the email program on the server. The first thing you need to do is setup your mail program to execute a script when it receives email at a certain email address. Then have that script do the function you desire.

  The exact way to do this, like I said before, is different depending on your mail program but Google “execute script with email” and the name of your mail program.

  Here’s an example for sendmail.

  Abraham
• 

  Ryan Steiner

  April 15, 2008 at 4:20 pm

  Hey Abraham,
  Thanks for the reply. You’re right… anything is possible. I should have asked “will I be able to…” ;-). Anyway, I looked over that link you posted, and my head’s swimming. I’m thinking that my solution might just be to use blogger.com. I found a nice little java script do-hicky that pulls the feeds from blogger and embeds them on your page in a way that is modifiable through CSS (here’s a link if anyone wants to make use of it: https://landmark-project.com/feed2js/build.php). While not perfect, I think it should suit my (and my client’s) needs.

  Thanks again for the quick response :-).

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