Schedule weekly RSS email

[demonboy]

Hi,

I am trying to create a workflow whereby I pick up my RSS feed, put it in an email and send to my subscribers. I have connected Amazon delivery and done and test and all is ok. The parts I am struggling with are:

1. How do I pick up ALL NEW articles in the RSS feed from the last week, NOT just trigger when a single article is created?
2. How do I include the featured image as a thumbnail?
3. How do I assign the RSS content to an HTML email template?

So far the only RSS option is to trigger when there is a new article.
And all I can send is a text-based email with no formatting. I don't understand how I connect an html email template and I don't understand how I populate the email template with the RSS content, including an image.

I'm trying to get a comprehensive reply from Pabbly Email Marketing but I am not sure they understand exactly what I am trying to do, and simply send screenshots of the triggers I am supposed to be using. I'm trying to get my head around the limitations of what I am trying to achieve. Is it even possible to send a weekly RSS round-up of all my latest posts from my Wordpress site and send it in an html email? If not, what other options do I have?

[edit] Perhaps there is an alternative. Run a daily trigger to pick up new Wordpress posts by using the Wordpress trigger and Woo to pick up the image. Send those fields to a spreadsheet or database somewhere, then assign the contents of that database to an html email, where the title, content, image, author, date etc is created for each article in an html email. Then send that email out once a week to my subscriber list (held on pabbly). Repeat the process the next week, somehow over-writing the contents of that database with new wordpress entries.

This is just me clutching at straws here. I am literally pulling my hair out to find a way to do this but I'm not getting much in the way of support from Pabbly. I am uncertain that support at Pabbly understand exactly what I am trying to do. I am sitting here with cash in my hand, waiting to start paying for Pabbly, but I can't do this until I can find a solution to my workflow, so I would be grateful of a comprehensive reply, thank you.

 

[Pabblymember11]

Hey @demonboy

If you want to get the latest RSS feeds from your feed URL you may refer to the following video lesson and process the details on WordPress.

Please give it a try and let us know.

Further to process the featured images you can check the following workaround.

It's not possible to fetch old feeds from your RSS web URL and process them directly in WordPress. RSS feeds typically only trigger actions for new content and don't provide a way to retrieve past content retroactively.

 

[demonboy]

Hi, thanks for replying but like your email support, you completely misunderstand what I want to do.

I want to fetch the RSS feed FROM my Wordpress and deliver it TO a subscriber list via a customised email template.

A wordpress RSS feed, which is an XML file, typically contains the last ten articles, or however many you have set in Wordpress. Mine is ten. Look at my feed in Chrome browser (doesn't work in Firefox) and you will see a number of articles: https://followtheboat.com/feed/

(Note that in this example, images aren't included as I've yet to add them to the feed, but I'll be doing that later this week)

I want to pull that feed once a week and check what is new. Whatever is new (could be one article or could be ten) is then formatted into an html email.

That email is generated by taking the heading, the thumbnail, the date, author, excerpt and link for each article (these are all identifiable fields in the XML file). The email template, or some other trigger in Pabbly, has to run through a loop and repeat this format for each new article. If two new articles are published on my wordpress site this week, whose details are contained in the RSS feed, so the email is generated to include those two articles.

This is how MailChimp, Zoho and other similar services work.

If Pabbly can't handle Wordpress RSS feeds, there must be another way for Pabbly to check my Wordpress XML feed (or even using the Pabbly Wordpress trigger) and pull all articles from the last seven days with their links and thumbnails etc. Maybe it builds a simple database, or even a spreadsheet, and adds links, tags and content. This could be run every day or every week, but it only adds new articles from that seven day period. I assume that, if you used the XML feed, because each article uses the same tags like <title>, <link> etc, each entry has to be rewritten as <title1>, <link1>, <title2>, <link2> etc. IDK about that, maybe you have a better idea?

On the day of publish, an email template is generated, pulling data fields from the spreadsheet, formatted to include a nice large heading, an aligned thumbnail, the excerpt and a link to read more for each article. Since the thumbnail is just a link, the only lengthy field input is the excerpt, which is capped at fifty words anyway.

After the email has been created, it gets sent out to my contacts via PEM.

And finally, the spreadsheet is then cleared of all data, or a new spreadsheet is created to capture the next seven days of published wordpress articles.

And I'm assuming this kind of workflow because, as I understand it, PEM does not offer RSS-templated emails.

I'd appreciate your thoughts on how this can be achieved. Thank you for your time.

 

[Pabblymember11]

Hey @demonboy

Our team has replied to your query on your ticket(#61562), please check that out.

 

[demonboy]

Thank you. I have sorted it now and found a solution. I can post a proper workflow to help others in the future but essentially it requires installing the Wordpress JSON feed plugin. That creates a json version of the XML feed, which is then easy to pull into Pabbly to create an email with all posts.

 

[Pabblymember11]

Hey @demonboy

Thank you for the update. If feasible, please share the reference to the solution so that it may assist other users who encounter similar issues.

 

[demonboy]

Sure. I just need an answer to the CSS styling question I left on my other post.

 

[Pabblymember11]

Hey @demonboy

Sure, we have replied to your query on your other thread, please check that out.

Create Email Template HTML restrictions

Hi, What are the HTML restrictions of the email template? I want to style my layout so can I include CSS like .myDiv { border: 5px outset red; background-color: lightblue; text-align: center; }

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