Add default email template #1898

milescalabresi · 2015-11-22T04:15:13Z

Adds editable default HTML template for emails sent through the comm panel. The Travis build failed, but I believe this is (now, after a few fixes) because of the test. The code works when I tested by hand, and the Travis build appears to test the message body in a way that assumes the old code.
Of course, I could be wrong, so someone who knows Travis better than I do should verify, and perhaps update the build if this change seems like something worth implementing

(chapter request) add a default template that can be overridden via /admin/ for chapters who regularly use HTML templates and don't want to copy-paste into the box

per a chapter request, this change makes the comm module use a default email template to wrap around all messages sent through the comm panel. Now users just type in HTML into the comm panel and it is automatically put into a template set via template overrides (default is just to put <html> tags around the message typed into the comm panel)

benjaminjkraft · 2015-11-26T03:17:34Z

Yep, it looks like the test is failing because the exact test changed. So you can just update the test to use the correct message body instead of the one it has.

benjaminjkraft · 2015-11-26T03:20:29Z

esp/esp/program/modules/handlers/commmodule.py

@@ -109,6 +110,11 @@ def commprev(self, request, tl, one, two, module, extra, prog):
        esp_firstuser = ESPUser(firstuser)
        contextdict = {'user'   : ActionHandler(esp_firstuser, esp_firstuser),
                       'program': ActionHandler(self.program, esp_firstuser) }
+
+        htmlbody = unicode(loader.get_template('email/default_email_html.txt').render(DjangoContext({'msgbdy': body,


I think the more standard thing is to use render_to_string() rather than get_template() and unicode(), and in that case you don't need to call the Context instance yourself, you just pass a dict.

Also, I think you want htmlbody instead of body here, otherwise lines 105-108 are meaningless. Also also, passing the user and program in here is unnecessary.

Edit: Oh, I see why you might want to. I guess it's fine, although it might be good to have a warning somewhere (not sure where) that if you modify the template you should make sure not to use any user vars (ideally not even any program vars) inside the {% autoescape off %} block.

benjaminjkraft · 2015-11-26T03:28:43Z

Ooh, cool! I'm assuming that the point of this is to make it easier for chapters to add a standard header/footer to their message?

benjaminjkraft · 2015-11-26T03:36:21Z

esp/templates/program/modules/commmodule/step2.html

@@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
 Please write your email/message now. Note that you can use <tt>{{ parameter }}</tt> to enter a parameter
 into the text of the message&mdash;the parameters are listed below.

-<p><b>Tip:</b> If you would like to send your message in HTML format, wrap your entire message body in &lt;html&gt; and &lt;/html&gt; tags.</p>
+<p><b>Tip:</b> The default {{ settings.ORGANIZATION_SHORT_NAME }} template (which you can modify <a href="/admin/utils/templateoverride/">here</a>) is automatically wrapped around your message below.


You can actually probably link straight to /admin/utils/templateoverride/?name=default_email_html.txt or something to automagically do the search/filter for the right TO (if it exists).

That's a great idea! Thanks! I forgot you could search by name. I'll add that in once we settle on a good name for file, which will probably depend on what we decide for this guy.

milescalabresi · 2015-11-26T03:40:50Z

Yes exactly! Neat idea, right? Yale Splash came up with the idea after people got tired of typing the "click here to unsubscribe" footer and wanted it automatically inserted. Now people can add, for instance, inline images from the filebrowser or make the emails more phone-friendly without having to copy-paste the same markup background text each time they use the comm panel.

As you can see, I executed this whole thing a little sloppily. I really appreciate your detailed comments, by the way! I will get to work on fixing it up. Regarding the loader.render_to_string command, I saw that, but when I tried to use it, it prematurely rendered the file so user-entered parameters would show up unrendered. Any idea on how to fix that without doing my hack?

benjaminjkraft · 2015-11-26T04:05:16Z

How were you calling render_to_string, and what was the output?

milescalabresi · 2015-11-26T04:38:31Z

Oh, on second thought, I might have done that before I remembered to turn autoescaping off. I'll check again after fixing the other stuff. I'll probably open a new pull request, depending on what we decide on the HTML/plain text/Markdown question.

mgersh · 2016-01-29T03:52:45Z

esp/esp/program/modules/handlers/commmodule.py

-                                                      msgtext    = body,
+                                                      msgtext = unicode(loader.get_template('email/default_email_html.txt').render(DjangoContext(
+                                                                                                                                       {'msgbdy': body,
+                                                                                                                                        'user': request.user,


This causes the template to render user variables in the template itself (not message body) with information about the sender. Not a problem with the default since there's no use of the user, but this is what's causing Yale's bug. Since the template is going to get rendered into one copy for all users, which then gets further transformed later into the individual copies, user information shouldn't be passed here at all.

Is there a way to add user information into the template? It would be very useful to put, for instance, the username the email was sent to.

Yeah, you can still put user information in the template; it will just get interpreted on the second render pass, when we add user variables.

Sorry, I don't quite understand what the difference is / what needs to be done in order to make sure the right thing happens instead of the variables being rendered in the template?

This template should get rendered twice. First, here, we render msgbdy into default_email_html.txt to get msgtext. This happens once, and therefore should not include any user data, because we don't yet know what user the email will be sent to. Then, later, below, we the output of that (msgtext) into the actual email, once for each user, injecting their information into the template. Any variables in msgtext will get interpreted on the second pass. When you include request.user the first time, it means that any user variables in default_email_html.txt get rendered according to the user sending the email, because that's who request.user is; instead you want to render them the second time with the email's recipient as the user.

I wrote too quickly above and was a bit incorrect: any template variables that you put in default_email_html.txt that should get rendered on the second pass, i.e., any user variables, need to have their template tags excaped, using {% templatetag openvariable %} instead of {{ and {% templatetag closevariable %} instead of }}. This way, the first rendering pass will convert those to {{ and }} and then the second rendering pass will see them as normal variables, and interpolate the correct user's information.

benjaminjkraft · 2016-05-17T07:34:10Z

@milescalabresi any progress on this? Anything I or others can help out with? If it would be helpful we can talk through some of the tricky bits on Skype sometime.

milescalabresi · 2016-05-17T16:20:17Z

No, but thanks for the poke. I'll get on it this week and definitely take you up on the offer. Much appreciated.

harianbarasu · 2016-07-09T03:36:05Z

Next steps are probably going to be:

Add radio buttons to step2.html giving users options for either plain text in email or HTML
Implement quick check to confirm plain text vs HTML (if we see tags and they've selected plain text, yell at them; if we see <html> or </html> either way, also yell at them.)
If plain text is checked, run through simple regex parser to convert whitespace to and add tags

milescalabresi · 2016-08-23T03:42:21Z

More specifics on the steps (thanks to Ben for the advice):

If the user selects neither HTML nor plaintext on the radio buttons, display a default Django forms error.

Step 2:
If they select plain text but then enter  or something, then use a jquery-ui (https://jqueryui.com/dialog/ for the dialog) that forces them to acknowledge "yes I know, do it anyway" so that the tags would get sanitized to  (or the corresponding "something") before the text is converted to HTML (and the whitespace is adjusted).

Details on Step 3:
if you choose plaintext, we want to replace <, >, and & with their codes, double newlines with  , single newlines with  , in that order, and then wrap the whole thing inside

[template stuff]

...body...

(As I learned, <html> and </html> tags are not required in emails.)

Details on the template:
we would need to set the mimetype to text/html (I should double check that, though), but the standard Django libraries should be able to handle that for usand see http://www.inboxinspector.com/ for a preview.
Wikipedia says text/html; charset=UTF8 should do the trick, and Django should fill that in (see https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/topics/email/ and we can even include both HTML and text parts: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/topics/email/#sending-alternative-content-types).

Added steps : consider having a "view this email in a browser" link, and see http://www.inboxinspector.com/ for a preview.

also includes some small merge fixes and improves cleaning of plain text to put in an HTML template (which will be introduced in the next commit)

willgearty · 2019-02-06T16:55:03Z

So...hate to be THAT guy, but I'm going to guess that #2666 will break this. But I do think #2666 is an important addition, so hopefully it won't be too hard to integrate these changes with that?

milescalabresi · 2019-02-07T01:21:24Z

thanks for the heads-up. I'll look at it before I finish this branch

willgearty · 2020-02-10T04:41:50Z

Any update on this? Do we think this will be ready for SR12?

milescalabresi · 2020-02-11T00:17:07Z

haven't touched it in a while, sorry. I can try to make this the March priority, but I want to discuss the scope with the team given the impact of the GUI

willgearty · 2020-02-11T04:06:52Z

Maybe something like #2885 would be more appropriate then? We could have some array of buttons like they do in other mass-mailing services (e.g. Mailchimp) that would import/inject a template into the commpanel GUI. The most basic version could pull all of templates from a template folder (e.g. /program/commpanel/templates) and then just show the name of the template in the button. A more advanced version could actually render the templates within the buttons. This way, chapters could create any number of custom templates (as template overrides) within this folder, and each one would be selectable from the comm panel.

milescalabresi added 5 commits November 21, 2015 21:12

Create default_email_html.txt

868435f

(chapter request) add a default template that can be overridden via /admin/ for chapters who regularly use HTML templates and don't want to copy-paste into the box

fixes missing comma

eff3d7b

add instructions for admins to use new template

594b670

fixes missing import in commmodule.py

3284a76

milescalabresi added Enhancement Feature Request ChapterRequest Idea for Discussion labels Nov 22, 2015

milescalabresi self-assigned this Nov 22, 2015

benjaminjkraft reviewed Nov 26, 2015
View reviewed changes

mgersh reviewed Jan 29, 2016
View reviewed changes

benjaminjkraft added the Work in progress label Jul 21, 2016

add (curently inactive) radio buttons for text vs HTML

eda9ad5

add DIY unsubscribe message at bottom

53a614c

milescalabresi added 4 commits May 30, 2018 23:27

improve handling of user's selected language

e50ec11

pass correct html vs plaintxt variables

0b4ec30

also includes some small merge fixes and improves cleaning of plain text to put in an HTML template (which will be introduced in the next commit)

pass correct template and escape HTML

121b465

rename email template wrapper for consistency

d8599f4

willgearty mentioned this pull request Jul 10, 2018

Comm panel preview shows plain text as html (parameters only) #2564

Closed

willgearty added this to the Stable Release 12 milestone Apr 8, 2019

willgearty modified the milestones: Stable Release 12, Stable Release 13 Apr 2, 2020

willgearty modified the milestones: Stable Release 13, Stable Release 14 May 9, 2021

willgearty force-pushed the main branch 9 times, most recently from 5e141c9 to be64bb4 Compare November 22, 2021 17:10

willgearty modified the milestones: Stable Release 14, Stable Release 15 May 4, 2022

willgearty modified the milestones: Stable Release 15 Fixes, Stable Release 16 Aug 4, 2023

willgearty modified the milestones: Stable Release 16, Stable Release 16 fixes Sep 13, 2024

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Add default email template #1898

Add default email template #1898

milescalabresi commented Nov 22, 2015

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Add default email template #1898

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