Aug 6th, 2011, 8:27 AM
Hi Mark,
Sorry for the wait - I'm off traveling again (NY this time - boy it's hot!) so I'm playing catch-up in the forums.
So! I *still* think there's a problem with the design.
I see why you need it, totally - but I really can't add it back in as it was because it wouldn't make sense when considering the functionality as a whole.
Let me do my best to explain.
In your scenario, you have the placeholders being filled by whomever happens to be logged in - so you can have a single email template which sends different content depending on the client account info. Nice! That makes total sense now - thanks for the explanation. And I can totally see why that would be useful.
However, say I were to add back in the user placeholders back into the email template as before: then they would only make sense in certain contexts. Namely: when the user was logged in. For regular form submissions, those placeholders wouldn't be filled. For the administrator sending an email with that template, they'd be empty.
I really want to avoid "weirdnesses" like that, that are unintuitive and would require the documentation to make sense of it. If I were to use those placeholders, I could very much see myself forgetting
Frankly, I just don't like it...!
So how about an alternative solution. Have you stumbled across this page at all?
http://modules.formtools.org/hooks_manag...laceholder
One of the many things the Hooks Manager lets you do is add in arbitrary placeholders to be used in your email templates. What if you could define a Hook Manager rule that would always insert a {$signature} placeholder that would contain the appropriate data? One additional benefit would be that the signature placeholder could be used in multiple email templates so you wouldn't need to re-define it should you use multiple email templates that need it.
Would that be an adequate workaround, do you think?
I wouldn't bother looking too much into the module yet - I need to do a little legwork to confirm it would all work. But if it didn't, I'd make it.
- Ben
Sorry for the wait - I'm off traveling again (NY this time - boy it's hot!) so I'm playing catch-up in the forums.
So! I *still* think there's a problem with the design.
I see why you need it, totally - but I really can't add it back in as it was because it wouldn't make sense when considering the functionality as a whole. Let me do my best to explain.
In your scenario, you have the placeholders being filled by whomever happens to be logged in - so you can have a single email template which sends different content depending on the client account info. Nice! That makes total sense now - thanks for the explanation. And I can totally see why that would be useful.
However, say I were to add back in the user placeholders back into the email template as before: then they would only make sense in certain contexts. Namely: when the user was logged in. For regular form submissions, those placeholders wouldn't be filled. For the administrator sending an email with that template, they'd be empty.
I really want to avoid "weirdnesses" like that, that are unintuitive and would require the documentation to make sense of it. If I were to use those placeholders, I could very much see myself forgetting
Frankly, I just don't like it...!
So how about an alternative solution. Have you stumbled across this page at all?
http://modules.formtools.org/hooks_manag...laceholder
One of the many things the Hooks Manager lets you do is add in arbitrary placeholders to be used in your email templates. What if you could define a Hook Manager rule that would always insert a {$signature} placeholder that would contain the appropriate data? One additional benefit would be that the signature placeholder could be used in multiple email templates so you wouldn't need to re-define it should you use multiple email templates that need it.
Would that be an adequate workaround, do you think?
I wouldn't bother looking too much into the module yet - I need to do a little legwork to confirm it would all work. But if it didn't, I'd make it.
- Ben