HTML templates for email notifications

[danielbachhuber]

Let's make them look really good. They should include your editorial metadata too. Also, it should be possible to replace with your own styles, layout, or content.

Related forum requests:

• http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-edit-flow-edit-notification-contents-and-preview-url-for-anonymous-approvers

[danielbachhuber]

A request from the forum asks for the ability to just change some strings instead of possibly changing the entire email.

[gpspake]

Just checking in here since this issue seems to have gone a bit stale.

I think the post notification module (in conjunction with the editorial metadata module) is EF's strongest feature and is certainly worth improving.

The biggest problem right now is that the emails aren't very pretty and they're entirely hard-coded so changing them is tricky. I've modified the notifications module to make the emails a little bit more readable since they are only sent to users and they need to look nice and I assume a lot of EF users would need to do the same thing.

It probably wouldn't be too difficult to abstract the messages out since the post status change scenarios are hard-coded and finite but I'm also concerned that the post statuses are hard-coded because it doesn't support custom post status notifications, so I wonder if that's the best approach. There's also the question of how to add additional settings to the EF's current settings page structure. This feature is important enough, though, that it might be ok to break the rules a little bit and add some additional settings pages.

WP User frontend handles WP settings abstraction beautifully and the developer maintains a separate settings API class that does some pretty awesome stuff. It could provide some ideas about how to handle this.

A good start might be to generate the status-changes and notifications dynamically based on the registered post-statuses with some way of modifying messages with wysiwyg and some predefined short-codes. Later additional options could be added for custom notifications based on post-type and user-groups.

Thoughts?

[jerclarke]

+1 one for the general idea of this ticket. In implementing EF I'm constantly reminding myself that our users probably won't want to depend on the emails simply because they are confusing to look at.

There's not a lot of emphasis on the actual message compared to all the "UI" (links). For any kind of meaningful conversation people will probably log in to the post itself and review the Editorial Comments, which is fine except the post will often be "locked", which is confounding in a high-pressure situation.

IMHO a really good start would be to skip the idea of a "themed" HTML email, and instead just convert what's there now to simple HTML tags. Convert the links into actual anchors, the headings to headings and use some bold/big/small/italic sauce to put emphasis where needed and subdue the things that are always present. Let the email client make most of the style decisions, but give it a clean marked-up version of the content to work with. That would get us so far ahead!

P.S. Related is that it would be great if editorial comments notification emails had the previous comment(s) in a given thread included so you know what the conversation is about. That would avoid a lot of scenarios where the recipient is forced to log in just to make sense of the comment's content.