magento newsletter

Question

I have three related questions here regarding the Magento newsletter system - they are in the one post if that's OK. I thought it was appropriate do but feel free to break them up.

1) My client will only need to be able to send out an occasional newsletter from magento. This would only be a few times a year. Do I still need to set up a cron job for that and is there no way to just "Press Send"? The reason I ask is that when she does decide to send the newsletter she'd want it to send straight away, and not have to wait; so would that mean that I'd need to have a cron job executing for instance every hour 24-7 just to get a newsletter to send within 60 minutes of her sending it, or am I misunderstanding the entire system ?

2)There is no queue button on my newsletter template page that I can see. I am running 1.6. Is it missing or hidden or do I need to do something else to actually queue the newsletter for the cron ? I see someone is modifying app/code/core/Mage/Newsletter/etc/config.xml but this is not much use to me as it will be overwritten in the next update surely.

3)Can someone explain to me why there is only a place for templates and yet no place for the newsletters themselves. Normally newsletter software that I've used before eg phplist or mailchimp has one spot for template creation ( which is often done by a developer) and then when the client wants to send a new newsletter they just add content to essentially the blank spaces - but magento seems to put the two together and strangely6 label them template, which is not what it is at all. Can someone explain the logic behind this or point out what I'm missing ? I dont want to have to explain to my client that they just need to delete the content from the previous newsletter and replace it with new content.

Answer 1

Looks like I have the dubious honor of answering my own question:

1) No there's no way to just press "Send". You have to let the server send it via a cron job.

2) The queue button is indeed there it's hiding over on the right in the newsletter template page - it's not up with the regular buttons, no it's a drop down under the action column - nicely hidden Magento ;-) !!

3 )It seemingly does have both in a way, but it's not obvious. When you create a template and save it then you've got a template as you might expect; however when you choose the queue button from the dropdown it opens that template and you get to make changes to it before you queue it .... or at least that's how it looks to me at the moment anyhow.