django-newsfeed

What is django-newsfeed?

django-newsfeed is a news curator and newsletter subscription package for django. It can be used to create a news curator website which sends newsletters to their subscribers also it can be used to add a news subscription section to your website.

Features

Create monthly, weekly or daily issues with draft issue support.
Create posts with different categories.
Archive and display all of the issues in your website.
Newsletter e-mail subscription (ajax support) with e-mail verification.
Newsletter e-mail unsubscription (ajax support).
Sending newsletters for each issue to all the subscribers.
Fully customizable templates.
Uses Django\'s internal tools for sending email.
Efficient mass mailing support.

Requirements

Python: 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, 3.14
Django: 5.2 (LTS), 6.0, 6.1

Django 5.2 is tested on Python 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, and 3.14. Django 6.0 and 6.1 are tested on Python 3.12, 3.13, and 3.14. These are the releases that still receive upstream support.

CI also runs the suite on the Python 3.15 release candidate with Django 5.2, 6.0, and 6.1. A failure there does not fail the supported-version jobs. There is no Django beta or release candidate to test right now. Run the Python 3.15 watch locally with:

uv python install 3.15
uv run tox -e py315-django61

Example Project

You can view the example project for this package here. This is a news-curator and newsletter subscription application that only uses this package. It also uses celery, celery-beat and redis to send email newsletters in the background. The styles in the example project uses bootstrap.

Documentation

Installation

Install django-newsfeed using pip:

pip install django-newsfeed

Or, with uv:

uv add django-newsfeed

Then add newsfeed to your INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'newsfeed',
]

Then add newsfeed to your projects urls.py:

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    path('newsfeed/', include('newsfeed.urls', namespace='newsfeed')),
    ...
]

Usage

Available views

We provide these views out of the box:

latest_issue: newsfeed/
issue_list: newsfeed/issues/
issue_detail: newsfeed/issues/<slug:issue_number>/
newsletter_subscribe: newsfeed/subscribe/
newsletter_subscription_confirm: newsfeed/subscribe/confirm/<uuid:token>/
newsletter_unsubscribe: newsfeed/unsubscribe/

Templates

The basic templates are provided for all the views and emails with django-newsfeed. You can override the templates to add your own design.

Just add newsfeed directory inside your templates directory add templates with the same name as the showed tree below. more on template overriding on the django docs

Template Tree for django-newfeed:

templates
    └── newsfeed
        ├── base.html
        ├── email
        │     ├── email_verification.html
        │     ├── email_verification_subject.txt
        │     ├── email_verification.txt
        │     └── newsletter_email.html
        ├── issue_detail.html
        ├── issue_list.html
        ├── issue_posts.html
        ├── latest_issue.html
        ├── messages.html
        ├── newsletter_subscribe.html
        ├── newsletter_subscription_confirm.html
        ├── newsletter_unsubscribe.html
        └── subscription_form.html

Subscription confirmation Email

We send subscription confirmation email to the new subscribers. you can override these template to change the styles:

templates
    └── newsfeed
        ├── email
        │     ├── email_verification.html
        │     ├── email_verification_subject.txt
        │     ├── email_verification.txt

Admin Actions

These actions are available from the admin panel:

publish issues: The selected issues will be published.
mark issues as draft: The selected issues will be marked as draft.
hide posts: The selected posts will be hidden from the issues.
make posts visible: The selected posts will visible on the issues.
send newsletters: Sends the selected newsletters to subscribers in the current request. respect_schedule is False, so a future schedule does not block a manual send.

Send Email Newsletter

send_email_newsletter() renders each newsletter and sends it to subscribers. It does not depend on a task runner. Call it from whichever background runner you already use. Pass primary keys into the task, then load the newsletters inside the task. A queryset cannot be serialized into a task payload.

respect_schedule=False matches the admin action and sends the selected newsletters even when their schedule is still in the future. respect_schedule=True sends every unsent newsletter whose schedule has arrived. Omit newsletters for that scheduled run.

Django tasks

Django 6.0 and later include a task framework. The default backend runs the task inside enqueue(). Configure TASKS with a worker backend when the mail should be sent after the request ends.

# project/tasks.py
from django.tasks import task

from newsfeed.models import Newsletter
from newsfeed.utils.send_newsletters import send_email_newsletter

@task
def send_selected_newsletters(newsletter_ids, respect_schedule=False):
    send_email_newsletter(
        newsletters=Newsletter.objects.filter(pk__in=newsletter_ids),
        respect_schedule=respect_schedule,
    )

@task
def send_due_newsletters():
    send_email_newsletter(respect_schedule=True)

Replace the built-in admin action with one that only enqueues the task:

# project/admin.py
from django.contrib import admin, messages

from newsfeed.admin import NewsletterAdmin
from newsfeed.models import Newsletter
from project.tasks import send_selected_newsletters

admin.site.unregister(Newsletter)

@admin.register(Newsletter)
class QueuedNewsletterAdmin(NewsletterAdmin):
    actions = ("send_newsletters",)

    @admin.action(description="Send newsletters")
    def send_newsletters(self, request, queryset):
        send_selected_newsletters.enqueue(
            newsletter_ids=list(queryset.values_list("pk", flat=True)),
            respect_schedule=False,
        )
        messages.success(request, "Queued the selected newsletters.")

Celery

# project/tasks.py
from celery import shared_task

from newsfeed.models import Newsletter
from newsfeed.utils.send_newsletters import send_email_newsletter

@shared_task
def send_selected_newsletters(newsletter_ids, respect_schedule=False):
    send_email_newsletter(
        newsletters=Newsletter.objects.filter(pk__in=newsletter_ids),
        respect_schedule=respect_schedule,
    )

@shared_task
def send_due_newsletters():
    send_email_newsletter(respect_schedule=True)

Point Celery at the Django settings and let it discover tasks modules:

# project/celery.py
from celery import Celery

app = Celery("project")
app.config_from_object("django.conf:settings", namespace="CELERY")
app.autodiscover_tasks()

app.conf.beat_schedule = {
    "send-due-newsletters": {
        "task": "project.tasks.send_due_newsletters",
        "schedule": 60.0,
    },
}

The replacement admin action is the same as the Django tasks example, except the task is started with delay:

send_selected_newsletters.delay(
    newsletter_ids=list(queryset.values_list("pk", flat=True)),
    respect_schedule=False,
)

You can override this template to change the style of the newsletter:

templates
    └── newsfeed
        ├── email
        │     └── newsletter_email.html

Settings Configuration

The below settings are available for django-newsfeed. Add these settings to your projects settings.py as required.

`NEWSFEED_SITE_BASE_URL`

default: http://127.0.0.1:8000 (your sites URL)
required: True

This settings is required. You need to add your websites URL here in production. This is used to generate confirmation URL and unsubscribe URL for the emails.

`NEWSFEED_EMAIL_CONFIRMATION_EXPIRE_DAYS`

default: 3 (after number of days confirmation link expires)
required: False

This settings tells django-newsfeed to expire the confirmation link in specified number of days.

`NEWSFEED_EMAIL_BATCH_SIZE`

default: 0 (number of emails per batch)
required: False

This settings is helpful when there are a lot of subscribers. This settings tells django-newsfeed to send the specified number of emails per batch. if its zero (0) then all of the emails will be sent together.

`NEWSFEED_EMAIL_BATCH_WAIT`

default: 0 (in seconds)
required: False

This settings tells django-newsfeed how long it should wait between each batch of newsletter email sent.

`NEWSFEED_SUBSCRIPTION_REDIRECT_URL`

default: /newsfeed/issues/
required: False

This is only required if you are not using ajax request on the subscription form. The JavaScript code for ajax is included with django-newsfeed and on by default.

`NEWSFEED_UNSUBSCRIPTION_REDIRECT_URL`

default: /newsfeed/issues/
required: False

This is only required if you are not using ajax request on the unsubscription form. The JavaScript code for ajax is included with django-newsfeed and on by default.

Email From address

Verification messages and newsletters are sent from EMAIL_HOST_USER.

Django 6.1 projects that configure MAILERS cannot read the EMAIL_* settings. Set DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL in that case. django-newsfeed uses DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL when MAILERS is configured, and keeps using EMAIL_HOST_USER otherwise.

Signals

django-newsfeed sends several signals for various actions. You can add receivers to listen to the signals and add your own functionality after each signal is sent. To learn more about signals refer to django Signals Documentation.

Subscriber Signals

newsfeed.signals.email_verification_sent(instance): Sent after email verification is sent, with Subscriber instance.

newsfeed.signals.subscribed(instance): Sent after subscription is confirmed, with Subscriber instance.

newsfeed.signals.unsubscribed(instance): Sent after unsubscription is successful, with Subscriber instance.

Contribute

See CONTRIBUTING.rst for information about contributing to django-newsfeed.

License

The code in this project is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0