BuddyPress

It would be nice if it supported HTML emails. Not sure if this would be better as a hook or something else. I tried adding some HTML into the message body and it stripped out the HTML. Would be nice to be able to send some HTML in the email. The challenge of course is displaying that HTML to the end user in the text area.

Good idea. I’m working on another project where I’ll be attempting to send dual-mode emails: HTML that defaults to plain text when HTML isn’t available. Once I have figured out the intricacies of this delicate maneuver I will integrate it into this plugin.

Whole world of hurt!

techguy do you mean you want to allow users to configure the html version? That could well end up messy and broken?.

If you are going to attempt this html mail is best constructed using old school table layout and all your styling placed as inline.

I can see a virtue in pursuing this to produce branded emails with site logo etc but simply from an site admin perspective

As I think about it. I’d probably mod the email sending a bit and make it so that the user sending the invite can add a message, but that the rest of the email was defined by an administrator. Kind of like what Facebook does. So, the HTML part of the email would all be done by the administrator. That way, it takes out the end user screwing up the HTML in some way, but still would allow the sender to add a unique message.

Well the user customisation is already there along with the ability for the admin/site to ensure that certain parts remain inviolate, so I guess it’s a case of producing a skeleton html table layout for the back end that can be used or not and user custom message squirted into a preset td.

I would still suggest this is really a site concern , would be nice to be able to produce logo branded emails though, in fact would be nice to extend that to all system emails , guess we could do it manually or maybe replace existing email functions with include calls to new ones, always the pain of upgrades though. BP/WP could do with separating these site functions out so that we could safely access them.

@hnla makes a good point – maybe this is something best handled as a separate plugin, which would do HTML for all BP emails. Once you’ve written the skeleton, it should be trivial to filter the content of all mail messages.

It definitely should stand as a dedicated plugin, then you can tackle many areas of email generation with one nice clear backend screen for configuring ALL system emails, not sure it’s hugely simple though as I remember it being immensely confusing initially working with BP / WPMU as to where/ who was controlling emails and plugins to enhance things did so but at the expense of further confusion.

My plugin HTML Emails (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/html-emails) actually enables you to send HTML versions of the WordPress standard emails and customize them similar to how themes are built. It’s pretty easy for plugins to hook into and I’m sure could work.

Just wanted you to read this before considering html in emails:

http://www.asciiribbon.org/

Thanks.

@batmoo Thanks for the link. I will definitely check this out.

@stas I personally agree with most of what’s on that page. I am not a fan of HTML email. However, at this point probably 90-95% of clients are able to view such email, so it would be nice to give them the choice. I wouldn’t implement it unless either (a) both HTML and plaintext were sent in the same message, which would default to plaintext if HTML is not available (not sure if that’s possible) or (b) individual users would have the ability to turn off HTML email.

I agree with @boonebgorges. The concern I was following is that emails sent by BP will increase a lot with the new features and plugins that are developed so plaintext emails will be lighter to process.

@stas do you have a sense of just how much more overhead it takes to send out HTML emails? I know it probably depends a lot on the kind of markup you use (and whether you use images), but do you have a sense of how much memory, bandwidth, etc would be used if you switched from sending 1000 plaintext emails per day to 1000 HTML? Would it be enough to make a real difference on the performance of your site, or the kind of hosting you would need?

@boonebgorges, hmm, never tried benchmarking that kind of stuff, but at our university we got an everyone mailing list with some thousands of subscribers, and I saw that plain mails are much faster delivered compared to html mails (this includes the fact that mail filters aka milters and other antivirus scanners will process the smaller files faster with less resources).

I think it depends on how you implement it. Which means you should implement it as a back end item and not necessarily an option in the WP admin. However, if it’s done right, this shouldn’t cause any slow down for people. Plus, most people have HTML emails these days.

HTML emails are a lot more likely to end up in your user’s spam folder, you’d really need some way to be sure that he had added your address to his contacts before you could risk HTML. At the very least, set the first few emails that each users gets (especially any address confirmation emails) as plain text.