Managment of E-Mail send out & templates

phreak

Hi all,

I was just looking through the Garden GitHub issues and thought it might be an idea to rethink the managment of automated E-Mails from a Vanilla installation. I'm sure the Vanilla team thought about it before but i couldn't find an issue mentioning this.

When i look at the principle of giving the admin the possibility to add a logo to his community via backend or add category descriptions, i guess it would also be great to manage E-Mail send-outs and templates in a similar way. I don't speak of overcrowded E-Mails i think more in terms of beautifying the Admin/System to user communication to rise growth of a community.

E-Mailing is an important part to every community. From registration approval to notifications Vanilla still lacks an easy way of loading or creating a simple template for this cases. But they are substantial for the convertion of new users or feeling treated nicely. Sure i can hardcode some HTML in the locale file, but that might not be the way to go for not so experienced users. An easy preset template that allows adding a logo (or add the uploaded logo automatically) could usually do the job. Then there might be the possibility to define the sent out e-mails with some words that can be added in an textarea.

• Registration Approval E-Mail "Click this link"
• Registration Approved "Thanx for joining"
• Notifications "New message in your inbox"
• Notifications "xyz mentioned you in abc topic"
• ...

Maybe there could also be an option to subscribe to a weekly digest with statistics and recent discussions the user is involved.

Can we expect changes like this in the future?
Is the team working in any way on something like this?
What do you think of it?

For me it would help to professionalize the appearance of my community, also in dissociation of Facebook and all other community based services of the web.

hgtonight

I know email digests have been mentioned a few times.

I could see adding a nice frontend to make edits to the locale files (would have to switch to something else for storage I think). Maybe have a simple visual mockup.

Sounds like some forking or plugin making g needs to happen.

phreak

Ok, so you mean it might be able to do it by overriding the specific locale classes. Should we collect some funds for it (which will obviously be not so so easy, but i will be the first one to sponsor it ).

hgtonight

There is a AfterSet hook in the locale class in 2.1+ that could be used to directly overwrite the locales without needing to be able to modify files. It doesn't exist in 2.0 .

I am sure we could find a way!

peregrine

@hgtonight said:
I am sure we could find a way!

this is a case when "WE" means the singular "you".

phreak

@hgtonight's probably organising an army of ants who are skilled in coding. Otherwise i can't explain Yaga. Also @peregrine and some others seem to have contact to this alien ant tribe.

R_J

@phreak: I do not think an email editor is so important to code it alone. If such an effort is done, it should be a translation editor.
language definitions are not grouped in any way, so it will be hard to find the term you are looking for and I see nearly no benefit in not editing the definitions file manually. Except for maybe a delete-ini-to-apply-changes-button...

@hgtonight: why wouldn't you want to edit the files themselves?
But if you want to modify any files, couldn't the T() function be overridden so that it looks translation terms up in the list of self defined translations?

But I still would think that anything other than modifying definitions files would be an unnecessary performance break