Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Stop Simplenews from sending out a newsletter ( Drupal )

This tip is for people using Drupal and a module called Simplenews for maintaining and sending out newsletters to an email list.

There might come a time when you need to stop simplenews from sending newsletters - maybe because of issues with the module or the Drupal site, or you accidentally sent the wrong newsletter to a certain list of users. Whatever the reason, below is a quick way of stopping Simplenews.

  1. Backup your database first. You can use a module called Backup and Migrate to do so.

  2. Open phpMyAdmin, and look for under your Drupal site's database the simplenews_newsletter table.

  3. Determine the node id of the newsletter you are sending ( going into the edit page would show you the node id on the url ). Look for that node id on the simplenews_newsletter table, and click on the edit button on the left of the row ( pencil icon ).

  4. Change the s_status from 1 ( which means sending ) to either 0 ( unsent ) or 2 ( sent ).

  5. Empty the simplenews_mail_spool table ( this is where all the email addresses and status per message is stored ).

    You can use TRUNCATE to do this, as in the code below:

    TRUNCATE TABLE simplenews_mail_spool

Friday, June 24, 2011

WinFF - Open Source Video Conversion Tool

WinFF is an open source GUI for the swiss army knife of video conversion - ffmpeg. Supports most of the codecs supported by ffmpeg including flv, avi, asf and wmv. Features a simple and easy to use interface, and can do multiple conversions at the same time.

Platforms

WinFF runs on Windows ( Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Vista and 7 ) and Linux ( Ubuntu, Debian, Redhat and Suse ). There is also a portable version for Windows.

Resources

  1. WinFF Home
  2. WinFF Downloads
  3. FFmpeg Home
  4. FFmpeg General Documentation