Sending out a weekly newsletter based on calendar events?

Google Calendar, or similar?

[zwaldowski]

I'm trying to set up a web site for a local bar that has live music every night. In the current situation, the owner has a semi-private list and sends the weekly events out to an e-mail list. She has a lot of other things to do, so it's often forgotten.

One of my goals with this site is to have an automatic newsletter backend that sends out a weekly newsletter with the list of events to an e-mail list. Ideally, this would have a front-end that allows opt-in and opt-out.

How would I go about this? I have a Google Calendar set up with the events that I can fiddle with to get lists of dates. Is there a plugin/extension for a CMS, or such? Right now, I simply have a static site but I'm ready to move over to anything and everything. As could be expected, the only online search results I received related to other websites' weekly newsletters (very helpful, I know).

Thanks in advance for any any all help.

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], zwaldowski!

google calendar supports ical which is the de facto standard for calendar data exchange.
i would suggest finding a suitable tool based an that.

[zwaldowski]

Thanks! I was leaning toward the iCal end. I'm still having trouble deciding, though. I'm unsure whether I want to have the site static with some PHP includes for dynamic stuff, or have the entire site ported to a static CMS system so I can include available plugins (depending on the system, of course). In other words, I looked for that as well and all I can find is websites' newsletters, except only on sites that mention iCal.