Jul 13th, 2011, 9:13 PM
Hey Mark,
So I was looking into this tonight and now I'm leaning towards the opposite direction: remove those client account placeholders altogether.
Here's the thing: the feature doesn't really make sense - it never did with the Form Tools design. In the past, I've explained it like so: "those placeholders ({$FIRSTNAME}, {$LASTNAME}, {$EMAIL} and {$COMPANYNAME}) will be converted to the appropriate value if the email is sent to a client account."
It sounds like that makes sense, but actually it doesn't. Email templates with Form Tools 2 are designed to permit multiple recipients - the main recipient, multiple cc's and multiple bcc's. So what happens if you target multiple client accounts as ccs or bccs? What value would get those placeholders? Presumably the only logical solution would be to have those placeholders be evaluated if the MAIN recipient is a client account - but then, why not hardcode it? The name would never change; the only benefit would be in case the email itself changes, but does that need to be in the email content itself...?
Frankly, it seems very complicated for such a minor feature, and offers very little value.
You convinced? Disagree? Anybody? I'm going to wait a few days, but unless I hear a convincing counter-argument I think I'm going to drop the feature.
All the best!
- Ben
So I was looking into this tonight and now I'm leaning towards the opposite direction: remove those client account placeholders altogether.
Here's the thing: the feature doesn't really make sense - it never did with the Form Tools design. In the past, I've explained it like so: "those placeholders ({$FIRSTNAME}, {$LASTNAME}, {$EMAIL} and {$COMPANYNAME}) will be converted to the appropriate value if the email is sent to a client account."
It sounds like that makes sense, but actually it doesn't. Email templates with Form Tools 2 are designed to permit multiple recipients - the main recipient, multiple cc's and multiple bcc's. So what happens if you target multiple client accounts as ccs or bccs? What value would get those placeholders? Presumably the only logical solution would be to have those placeholders be evaluated if the MAIN recipient is a client account - but then, why not hardcode it? The name would never change; the only benefit would be in case the email itself changes, but does that need to be in the email content itself...?
Frankly, it seems very complicated for such a minor feature, and offers very little value.
You convinced? Disagree? Anybody? I'm going to wait a few days, but unless I hear a convincing counter-argument I think I'm going to drop the feature.
All the best!
- Ben