making emails prettier?

[mzimmers]

Hi -

I looked through the add-ons, but didn't find anything. Does anyone know of an add-on or enhancement to spiff up the appearance of the emails sent by the shop? As they are, they're functional, but plain and not as professional looking as some shops with which I do business.

I'm talking about stuff like:

- putting a logo at the top
- formatting the text a bit more elaborately
- organizing stuff in boxes

To make it look a little more like this:



Thanks for any suggestions.

[kuroi]

Normally they have a logo at the top. You just pop an appropriately named file in your emails folder. If the default name doesn't work, then you will need to edit each email template to pick up the new file name.

The appearance of emails can be tweaked or completely redesigned by editing the layout and css in each template. This isn't particularly susceptible to being made into a mod, and I don't recall seeing one.

At one level it's not too hard. But at another you need to take account of the very poor start of email clients when it comes to rendering HTML.

If you're stacking divs vertically, then the default layout works and most of your work would be with CSS.

But if you want to lay boxes out next to each other as you've shown then, sadly, you will probably need to resort to html tables to hold it all in place (this is the only context where you will hear me say that!)

[DrByte]

As kuroi has said, simply edit the email template files directly. They're in your /email/ folder.

[mzimmers]

OK, thanks, guys. A couple of questions right off the bat:

1. I'm looking at email/email_template_welcome.html, and I see that it does indeed try to include a header.jpg image, as kuroi mentioned. Any idea why this might not be displaying in my welcome emails? The file it calls does exist.

2. Is there a good reason that the css is included in the files, rather than in a stylesheet?

Thanks.

[DrByte]

1. If the image is referenced in the template, then it's being called. Whether you've got something on your server blocking its access from your email client is yet another matter.

2. Email clients support a VERY old HTML specification. As kuroi mentioned, they don't support contemporary things like DIVs very well. And, similarly, they don't support linked stylesheets very well. Especially the web-based clients. That's why they're embedded instead of linked.

(In v2.0, Zen Cart will have the ability to save a common stylesheet in the email folder and it will "suck it in" to embed it in the email, thus making the maintaining of the css a little more straightforward. In the meantime, you can build a common stylesheet and just copy-and-paste the same stuff in all your templates. It's not as convenient, but only takes a couple minutes to update them all.)

[mzimmers]

1. If the image is referenced in the template, then it's being called. Whether you've got something on your server blocking its access from your email client is yet another matter.

It is indeed referenced in the template. No conditions or anything around it. File exists, and is visible by pathname in a browser. The file email_template_welcome.html also references a variable $EMAIL_GREETING for which I can't find a define. I'm starting to wonder if this file is even being invoked at all. Is it possible that the welcome email is being generated by another means?

[DrByte]

That file is for the welcome email, sent when someone registers a new account.

$EMAIL_GREETING gets populated with the data from EMAIL_GREETING in your language file.

You can learn about the variables in the templates by reading the docs in the /docs/ folder of your site.

[mzimmers]

Well, I don't know what to say. When I register as a new user, the email I get has no header image. Also, the sample I look at in admin has no image as well. When I created this user, I specified HTML email.

It appears to be a certainty that if email_template_welcome.html is called, the image is rendered. This leads me to conclude that it *isn't* being called. Is there any other way such an email could be generated?

[DrByte]

Have you looked at the raw HTML of the received message inside your email client where the image is allegedly not appearing? What's the HTML showing there?

And, if you attempt to visit that image on your site via your browser, what happens? Do you *see* the image? Or do you get an error because something on your server is blocking it?

[mzimmers]

Have you looked at the raw HTML of the received message inside your email client where the image is allegedly not appearing? What's the HTML showing there?

I don't know how to do that. I'm using the most recent version of Mac Mail, though, and it showed me the image in the example I posted at the start of this thread.

I also viewed the ZC welcome email using a browser email facility, and it didn't show up there, either.

And, if you attempt to visit that image on your site via your browser, what happens? Do you *see* the image? Or do you get an error because something on your server is blocking it?

I see it:

http://www.cinderellaantiques.com/shop/email/header.jpg