Hi everyone. There are some changes in the code of version 7.7.6 for sending notification emails. This is related to automatic reminders, assignments and invites, but not related to campaign emails or any other email sent by users from the email module.
For users of language packs (other than English which is not really a language pack), you MUST upgrade your language pack to match this version, otherwise the emails won’t look right and links in emails won’t work.
Anyway, what I wanted to share is that now the HTML tags that you put in the templates are getting sent with the emails, instead of being stripped away as before. So you can go and create a custom/include/language/en_us.notify_template.html (or the equivalent in your language) from the original version found in include/langugage and play with the visuals of your emails.
They have been slightly improved already, but obviously a lot more can be done to make them look great.
A few tips when testing:
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test in several email clients: Gmail, something local like Thunderbird or Outlook, and some older web client if you can find one.
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check email source that gets sent, not just what you see. Email clients change a lot of things before showing you the email.
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two versions are sent, an HTML version and a text version. Some clients let you select the text version. Make sure that the text version also looks right, since some old or text-based clients will use it.
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HTML email is a tricky business, you have to stick to the allowed tags. You can’t just do all the things you can do in HTML web pages. There are plenty of pages online explaining how to do it well (for example https://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-code-html-email-newsletters/).
Have fun designing great-looking notifications! Then you can come back here and share your code. : - )