How to Send Email to Groupsite

I am still working on work arounds to the issue discussed above.

What I've done at this point is create a WordPress blog.  Wordpress permits external posting to their blogs (which Groupsite does not yet do), so I can post to that blog while reading social media on my iPad.

Then I've set up an RSS feed for my blog and have attached the RSS feed to the home page of my Groupsite.   This kluge chain permits me to externally post into Groupsite.

However, as best I can tell, Groupsite gives me no control over the formatting of my RSS feed.   What are the chances of me having access into a hook so I can format what this (plus all my other) RSS feeds look like.   In short: I want to display title plus a few sentences, not just the first few words of the title.  I want to include a graphic.

I have previous used a WordPress plugin that gives me such control, so I know this is possible to do.

In the spirit of being a do-er rather than a complainer, let me share my solution as I keep working it.

There seem to be several vendors who offer widgets that can be included into Groupsite widget modules.   A table of some of those vendor is here.   From that list I selected RSS Include as they offer a fairly simply non-programming method for adding RSS feeds. From the page I just linked you can see six free format, and five more advanced paid formats.  I did need to create a free account there.

I chose "simple vertical list" the first free format.  I gave it my RSS feed (that I previously created using a WordPress blog--that is not a trivial step if one has never created a blog, but one can use Posterous (really dead simple) to create a blog with an RSS feed out.  Again, the advantage of me creating a WordPress or Posterous blog is that they permit posting blog entries via email and other external sources.

Once I provided the URL of my RSS feed, I simply scrolled down through their questions.   

• I left the box title blank as Groupsite provides me a box title (I had to put in spaces as rssinclude does not permit a blank title)


• I set my box width to 625 (about the size of a wide Groupsite module (I haven't measured a narrow module, but it looks to be just over 300).  I set height of box (in rssinclude) to be 0 (which meant I had to select a specific height in Groupsite).


• I set item title to 18 and item description to 12 to match groupsite.


• My groupsite uses customized colors, so I matched colors to that - I don't have the hex mappings to the standard Groupsite colors.   I can say that I set background color to #FFFFFF, box border to "no border", and separation lines to 1px with color #E8E8E8 to fairly closely match Groupsite.

RSSinclude then gave me an "include" script.  I used their Javascript, but PHP or IFRAME probably works as well.   I copied the script from RSSinclude.  Then I created a new Wide Module in my Groupsite, chose "Embed Widget", gave it the title I wanted to show publicly, pasted the script, set a height--I am trying 238, but may opt to go taller, and saved.   It works.

I have continued to experiment today and found a widget that might interest others.

Twitter has a widget so you can display a selected Twitter feed on your page.   Their widget is here.

In my case, I have a nine page site, with custom content on each page (separate discussion sections, separate RSS feeds, etc.)  So I wanted to add separate Twitter feeds that tie to my site content.

In the Twitter widget I set up a boolean search.  Twitter has good info on how to do this here (click on Operators).  I pretty much took the Twitter defaults, though I did change colors to match my color scheme, set height to 238, and chose "autowidth" instead of calculating my module width.   I grabbed their code and pasted it into an "Embed Widget" module.  In Groupsite, left the title blank, and set my module height to 330px.   It looks great!

OK....so it's now about 3.5 YEARS since the 'send email to groupsite' request was started in this thread.

What's the update? 

This is a critical feature that I need to move my project over from Google Groups. My users are telling me that most of the time they want to interact with their (sub)group through their email client that they know and love.

Thanks to any and all for help or suggestions,

Richard

Hi Richard,

Thank you for your inquiry! We are including the response that was provided to you directly on October 09, 2012 18:54 from Support@groupsite.com as it also applies to your inquiry in Champions: