Universal header and footer for emails...

**swamyg1** · 29 Jan 2013, 07:27 AM

I would like to use a custom header and footer for my email... But I would like use a PHP include to pull in the header and footer to all of my emails from one master header and footer file, rather than having to manually code each email template with a header and footer. Does anybody know if this is possible? Would it work as I am hoping it would?

**kobra** · 29 Jan 2013, 08:34 AM

Email templates are html files not php

**swamyg1** · 29 Jan 2013, 03:17 PM

Oh yea, Duh my bad. Us there any way to achieve this with HTML files?

**kobra** · 30 Jan 2013, 05:55 PM

there any way to achieve this with HTML files?

You might try reading up on server side includes

http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/ssi

**DrByte** · 30 Jan 2013, 07:16 PM

No, server-side-includes won't be of any help with email templates, since the email templates in Zen Cart are never executed by the apache/webserver engine that processes SSI.

**DrByte** · 30 Jan 2013, 07:20 PM

Originally Posted by swamyg1

I would like to use a custom header and footer for my email... But I would like use a PHP include to pull in the header and footer to all of my emails from one master header and footer file, rather than having to manually code each email template with a header and footer. Does anybody know if this is possible? Would it work as I am hoping it would?

Really it's faster and simpler to simply copy-and-paste your changes into the handful of template files. Seriously, it's just a bit of CSS and a tiny bit of markup. Copy-and-paste will take you 5 minutes.

Otherwise, feel free to rewrite the template assembly code in functions_email. Be prepared to have to redo your custom code again with each new version of Zen Cart.
And if your changes are more complex than what copy+paste would accomplish, then programming a custom header/footer isn't the solution you need anyway.