Design/UX #21553
openEmail for Group Invitation
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Description
Because we are revamping our email communication design, updating the email design for the group invitations seems fitting.
The Current Email is a bit bland:
Could we update the layout and add a bit more information about the group, such as a card with the avatar, cover photo, and description? I am unsure how hard it would be to add the extra information.
Files
Updated by Boone Gorges 7 days ago
- File Screenshot_2026-03-23_10-47-00.png Screenshot_2026-03-23_10-47-00.png added
- Target version set to 2.8.0
I've attached a screenshot of how these emails currently look. It uses the improved header/footer, but it still just has the text content rather than the "card". The card is slick, but I wonder whether it's worth the work to implement it here and here alone. Ray, what do you think?
Updated by Boone Gorges 7 days ago
After I posted my last comment, I realized I got a second email for this invitation event. See attached. So one is coming from BP core (groups-invitation) while the other is coming through cac-onboarding.
Ray, do you have thoughts about how best to handle this? I assume we want to suppress the one from BP.
I also see that the images here are broken - they don't have a `src` attribute. I can dig into this a bit further, but I wanted to ask Ray first in case you have a quicker idea of why this might be happening.
Updated by Raymond Hoh 7 days ago
The first email is from The Group for Group Admins, which is our own customized email that piggybacks off of BP's invite email system for any group admin to join our specialized group. I didn't update this email yet. I think #20921 is a blocker, which we would need to return to.
The second issue is due to BuddyPress serving Gravatars with scheme-less URLs, which doesn't render in email clients. I attempted to address this in https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/02a69e680e1ebdbe6d15f5d69816a5350c5e8c94, but I need to see why this isn't working with the cac-onboarding emails.
Updated by Boone Gorges 7 days ago
The first email is from The Group for Group Admins, which is our own customized email that piggybacks off of BP's invite email system for any group admin to join our specialized group. I didn't update this email yet. I think #20921 is a blocker, which we would need to return to.
Ack, sorry about that - I'm a dope and I didn't read the email closely enough. So there's no real "double email" bug.
Let's leave the ticket open in case it helps keep track of the scheme-less URLs. Not urgent, but it would be nice to fix.
Updated by Raymond Hoh 6 days ago
Let's leave the ticket open in case it helps keep track of the scheme-less URLs. Not urgent, but it would be nice to fix.
I've addressed the scheme-less avatar URLs in https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/933601649dd5708b0c6423905b080b9269b3b868. I've also ported a fix from 2.7.0 to 2.6.x where we would ping Gravatar for site icons and group avatars unnecessarily: https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/2b4eabb69546e36da59ef7993329c95b6790462d.
As for the proposed card layout, I think we need to take into account that invites can have either groups or sites and can have multiple items, as well as an invite message if filled in. See https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/attachments/33762 for the current layout with multiple items and a message. If we want to add the group card with the group cover image and description, we can do it but we also have to keep in mind that sites do not have a cover image. Sites do have a description field (a.k.a. tagline), but some site admins do not change the default value of "Just another CUNY Academic Commons site" to something else.