Welcome to Django Drip’s documentation!

Django Drip is a simple app for creating drip campaigns for email using Django’s admin interface and a User queryset. It lets you dynamically build querysets and templates. Back in the day, you might write the code directly below to perform the task:

from datetime import datetime, timedelta
now = datetime.now()
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.core.mail import EmailMessage
from django.template import Context, Template

# get users who joined one week ago and have more than 25 credits on their profile
# (credits are an arbitrary example, you can imagine placing your own criteria here...)
users = User.objects.filter(date_joined__gte=now-timedelta(days=7),
                            date_joined__lt=now-timedelta(days=6),
                            profile__credits__gt=25)

# define the email template we want to send
subject_template = 'Thanks {{ user.username }}!'
body_template = 'We appreciate you buying {{ user.get_profile.credits }} credits! Please buy more!'

# render and send the email
for user in users:
    subject = Template(subject_template).render(Context({'user': user}))
    body = Template(body_template).render(Context({'user': user}))

    msg = EmailMessage(subject, body, 'me@example.com', [user.email])
    msg.send()

However, instead of writing and modifying code each and everytime you want to add a new drip to the campaign or edit the copy, you can simply edit the records listed in the admin interface. Plus, Django Drip also handles deduplication, making sure the same user never gets an email for the same drip compaign twice.

The admin equivalent for the code above is pictured below:

the above code example, in the admin!

But the killer feature is the ability to view emails expected to be sent, by clicking the “View Timeline” link in the top right when editing a drip:

these are the emails that are ready to be sent

Now you can just set up a cronjob to send drips daily (you could also do hourly, or weekly, depends on your use case).

python manage.py send_drips

Installing:

We highly recommend using pip to install django-drip, the packages are regularly updated with stable releases:

pip install django-drip

Next, you’ll want to add drip to your INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py.

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.comments',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    'django.contrib.admin',

    # Your favorite apps

    'drip',
)

Don’t forget to add DRIP_FROM_EMAIL to settings.py, or else we will fall back to EMAIL_HOST_USER.

Finally, be sure to run python manage.py syncdb or python manage.py migrate drip to set up the necessary database tables.

python manage.py syncdb
# or...
python manage.py migrate drip

Custom Message Classes

By default, Django Drip creates and sends messages that are instances of Django’s EmailMultiAlternatives class. (The plain-text version of the email is generated by stripping HTML tags from the rendered body template.) This email generation and creaton of the EmailMultiAlternatives instance that will be sent is done by the drip.drips.EmailMessage class. If you have a need to customize in any way the message that is created and sent, you can do that by creating a subclass of drip.drips.EmailMessage and overriding any method(s) that you need to behave differently than they do by default. For example:

from django.core.mail import EmailMessage
from drip.drips import DripMessage

class PlainDripEmail(DripMessage):

    @property
    def message(self):
        if not self._message:
            email = EmailMessage(self.subject, self.plain, self.from_email, [self.user.email])
            self._message = email
        return self._message

Here, PlainDripEmail overrides the message property of the base DripMessage class to create a simple EmailMessage instance instead of an EmailMultiAlternatives instance. Note the value for the message property can be anything that has a send method that returns a True/False indication of whether the message was actually sent. Also, other properties of DripMessage may be overridden to change the way in which the Drip’s information is used to generate the message subject, plain text, etc.

In order to be able to specify that your custom message class should be used for a drip, you need to configure it via the DRIP_MESSAGE_CLASSES setting. For example:

DRIP_MESSAGE_CLASSES = {
    'plain': 'proj.email.PlainDripEmail',
}

This setting will allow for choosing in the admin, for each drip, whether the “default” (drip.drips.Dripmessage) or “plain” message class should be used for generating and sending the messages to users that meet the drip criteria. Note there is an “default” key mapped to the default DripMessage class that is added to the settings-configured DRIP_MESSAGE_CLASSES dictionary if that value does not have a “default” key. If you wish to use a custom class for all drips, simply specify that custom class as the “default” key value in the settings, for example:

DRIP_MESSAGE_CLASSES = {
    'default': 'proj.email.PlainDripEmail',
}

Development:

First, clone the repository:

git clone git@github.com:zapier/django-drip.git django-drip
cd django-drip

Next, create the virtualenv and populate it:

mkvirtualenv djangodrip
pip install -r requirements.txt

Finally, run the tests:

./manage.py test drip

You can, of course, build the sphinx docs as well:

cd docs
make html

Find the built docs in _build/html.

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