CUNY Academic Commons

I've started work on the email redesign that Sara has made mockups for. I've attached some screenshots that I took from GMail (web client) so the look-and-feel will not look 1:1 to the mockups due to the missing Google fonts, but for capable email clients, the font will display if you have allowed external fonts to be loaded. This is available for testing on cdev.

• There are a bunch more emails that are not styled. Check out https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/members/me/settings/notifications/ to see which other emails are being sent. Also see the attached screenshot named buddypress-emails.png for a master list of all other emails potentially being sent out. Some of the emails in this list might not be in use on the Commons. Will need an audit. If you need any help with this, feel free to reach out to myself or Boone.
• For the New Message email, I've changed the "New Message" email heading to reference the private message subject line that is used when composing a private message. I've also added message attachments to the body of the email.
• For the New Friendship Request email, I've changed the verbiage and button text to reference the Action Center page since that is where users should be managing their incoming friendship requests.
• The New File In Group email is sent when a file is uploaded to the group's Library, so I've removed the "View Discussion" button. However, if an attachment is added to a Forum Reply, then the attachment is listed at the end of the Forum Reply email.
• I've added a New Group Event email. The styling is mostly the same as the New File email, but it has a "Download iCalendar File" button instead of the "Download File" button.
• I've also added a Friendship Accepted email. No screenshot for this one.
• I still need to adjust the email footer so the Unsubscribe link is aligned to the right for applicable emails. I'll work on that on upcoming revisions.

• I've created a new branch for this work at feature/22840-email-design and have merged the branch to 2.6.x. Commits can be viewed here: https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/compare/master...feature/22840-email-design.
• I'm reusing the email template made for the registration, activation and password reset emails. See here.
• I added a "Date Modified" column to the BuddyPress Emails admin page since it wasn't clear which emails have been touched and modified in the backend. See https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/14b611c9f65065337613340f3f391ea26afa2fd7.
• caniemail.com is a good reference guide for which CSS rules and HTML elements can be used in email. To achieve the avatar overlay in the mockups, I'm using the group avatar as a background image and a padding offset for the user avatar.
• Gravatars do not show up in Thunderbird, but do in GMail. Uploaded avatars show up fine in Thunderbird. I haven't tested other email clients yet.
• I chose to use the existing email post types in the DB so when it is time to deploy to production, the post content for the various email post types will need to be updated. I can provide a list of what needs to be updated once the team has signed off after testing.

I think next steps are we need to determine which other emails we will need to redesign and then, plan accordingly.

Just to update, all emails located on the "Account Settings > Notifications" page are now covered, as well as the two emails from the Invitations modal. The Invitations modal emails proved to be the most difficult to implement due to the dynamic nature of the invited content and having to use <table> HTML markup. I've attached just screenshots of the Invitations modal emails for now. These screenshots were taken from Thunderbird with remote fonts and images enabled.

The next two on my priority list for 2.6.0 are the Pending Registration email (#21647) and a barebones conversion of the Group Email Digest email.

For later maintenance releases, the Group Email Digest email layout can be tweaked, and support for the remaining emails from the spreadsheet can be added.