Enhanced Emails – weekly update

After posting the 0.2 release notice I forgot to post the weekly update – sorry for the 24 h delay 🙂

Since GSoC is coming to an end, I’m glad that despite my health problems during the first part of GSoC I was able to pull it off and meet the project goals. The 0.2 release takes care of the most important bugs of 0.1 and introduces support for all major email clients, desktop and mobile. Litmus proved that the design does well on *all* platforms and even Symbian handles them quite well 😉 I will be releasing 0.2.1 this weekend, with some minor bugfixes, a few template handling improvements and some small naming changes.

One thing that I’m unhappy with is the fact, that I wasn’t able to do much work with the UI team – and because of wcsf I wasn’t able to get much input on the 0.2 version last week, either. I’m sure there will be plenty of input later and I’ll be happy to keep working on the improvements.

@westi mentioned that he’d like to see this project incorporated to the core – I’d personally love to see it in 3.4 and will do everything to keep improving it as long as it’s needed. All comments and remarks are highly welcome – I’d like to get the best out of the project and with the proper input – I’m sure we’ll be able to finally incorporate html e-mails support for WP 🙂

I would like to thank @justin and @aarondcampbell – you were both very helpful and I knew that I could rely on your help and friendly suggestions during the whole summer. The same goes for Mo Jangda – our e-mail conversations helped me a lot, cheers!

Hey there As I mentioned in the previous…

Hey there,

As I mentioned in the previous posts, 0.2 is here. I have introduced some more changes today and tested the whole design via litmus. It went well, and I was very surprised to find that most e-mail clients handle max-width pretty well. Thanks to that I was able to achieve some nice results for mobile devices. The smallest width is 320px, and if the mobile screen is wider than that, the design adjusts itself accordingly.

So, here are a few screenshots to give you an idea of how it looks (Android on the left, Symbian S60 on the right (notice the forced 320px width in the second case – it helps avoid extremely long comment boxes):

The plugin should be available on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/enhanced-emails/ any minute, you can also find the latest version here: http://gsoc.svn.wordpress.org/2011/wojtek.szkutnik/enhancedemails/

Enhanced Emails – Weekly Update v0.2

Ahoy! As usual, there’s good news and bad news. Bad news is, that I’m already a few days behind the date I set for 0.2 last week. The good news is, that there is only one bug left until I will be able to commit the code to the plugin repo (I screwed up the template hierarchy update, should take me a few hours to fix that).

So, here’s what’s cookin’. I have:

• Refactored template hierarchy methods (I have changed the way that the plugin is looking for templates to use)
• Added output sanitization (embarassing 0.1 defect pointed out by westi 😉 )
• Changed the template handling functions (removing the use of output buffer)
• Added general layout to avoid html duplication
• Tested the plugin on Android, IPhone and desktop clients (there are improvements over 0.1 but there will be some more)
• Improved CSS in a few places
• Changed my wp_mail wrapper to fit current wp_mail even more strictly (basically, now you can use exactly the same arguments)
• Improved documentation and plugin descriptions
• Started working on some basic info for developers

Expect 0.2 to go live on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/enhanced-emails/ somewhere between today and tomorrow.

I was thinking about making the MU emails pluggable and having them use Enhanced Emails as well as a task for last week. What do you think?

cheers

Enhanced Emails – weekly update

This week I have released the alpha version of the plugin, see https://gsoc2011.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/enhanced-emails-early-alpha-release/. I’m working on the documentation now and I’m improving the theme hierarchy handling.

Aloha!

As you all know, I have spent most of June on recovering from a heavy back injury and I have lost over a month of GSoC time. There was a high probability that I wouldn’t be able to deliever the scheduled release on time, so I’m extremely happy to announce the 0.1 release of the Enhanced Emails plugin. It was a very hard time for me and I’m really glad that all went well. You can checkout the code from the GSoC 2011 repo.

So, how exactly does it work?

The plugin uses a tweaked version of Ryan McCue’s #15446 patch hence the pluggable.php file. The patch is supposed to make it to the core soon and I will be able to remove the wp_mail override then. I tried to make the eemails_wp_mail wrapper work as close to wp_mail as possible, to allow easy use in plugins and make future merging with the core easier 😉

We have a global “Use HTML Emails” setting:

as well as a per-user setting:

These settings will be ignored in the alpha version and HTML e-mails are always used, due to the fact that I want to push the “use html” “if” into wp_mail, to make it work for multiple recipients.

Have a look at the current HTML E-mails, generated with the plugin enabled:

Noticed the “action link” bar at the bottom? It’s fully customizable. I tried to make the wrapper as easy to use as possible, and to customize the action links for any e-mail, you just use the following array:


array(
'link'=> 'http://example.com',
'color'=>'ff0000',
'text'=>__('Simply red')
)

and put as many of them as you like in the “action_links” argument 😉 You can use eemails_wp_mail just as you would use wp_mail and it will work great! If you use the default template, the engine will try to fit your text message to work well with the generic HTML layout.

I encourage all of you to try the plugin as soon as possible and report as many bugs as you can find!

And, as a formality, my GSoC 2011 schedule checklist:

	design the html email looks
	code the designs in HTML/CSS
	code functions responsible for template hierarchy
	create a generic theme
	create the action-dependant files
	add the management features (as mentioned, I skipped the one-liner “if” intentionally, the rest of the settings mechanics is here)

I already did some testing under Gmail, Mozilla Thunderbird and Android. During the second GSoC stage I will be probably improving the styling to fit the mobile devices, but it’s already readable and there are no significant problems with floats, padding etc.

Also, I would like to give a big thank you to Andrew Nacin, Aaron Campbell, Justin Shreve and Mohammad Jangda (random order 😉 ) for helping me with the project!

For the rest of the week I will be improving documentation and fixing bugs.

 

cheers and good luck with preparing your projects for midterms!

W.

Tip of the day: when you feel that your e-mails plugin is not working – check all these gmail filters you created years ago and forgot about, you may find your 200 missing messages there.

Enhanced Emails – Weekly Update

Ahoy!

This week was finally about GSoC and nothing else. I have coded the template hierarchy, per-user and per-admin plugin options, and I’m almost through with implementing the templates. I have also consulted Mohammad Jangda, the author of the wonderful Enhanced Emails plugin, and talked to him about improvements over his plugin, which turned out to be very helpful. I hope that I’ll be able to provide a working demo soon 🙂

Take care,

W.

Enhanced Emails – weekly update

Ahoy there!

 

This week I was getting up to speed with coding the wrapper and trying to make it work, expect code samples during the next 48 hours and a working demo before the end of the week 🙂

Enhanced Emails – Weekly Update

Another round of rehab wasn’t exactly what I was expecting for the last few days. I have to report mostly frustration and pain, but they say that everything that could go wrong has already gone wrong, so… 😉 Besides, apparently the painkillers they got me “just in case” are strong enough to carry me through the summer if I feel any pain. So, during the next days I will be trying to squeeze a month’s job in 10 days and hope to catch up before midterm.

Cheers,

W

Enhanced Emails, Weekly Update 7

Hey everybody!

Last week the emails design went to the UI team and I started working on the template hierarchy and the generic/specific files. This part will be probably where I’ll be able to do some catching up. I also started designing how the wrapper will work and after consulting it in a few days with my mentors I’ll be able to head towards some working solution.