NC12 ignores custom mail templates for the activity app

[BenS89]

Steps to reproduce:

• Create a custom mail template for the activity app under /themes/customTheme/apps/activity/templates/email.notification.php
• configure your custom theme in the nextcloud config
• Do something and wait for the activity app so send notification mails

Expected behavior:
The notification mail uses the configured template (as it was in NC11)

Actual behaviour:
The configured template gets ignored. The mail includes the default template text.

Enabled apps:
Calendar 1.5.3
Contacts 1.5.3

PHP-Version: 7.1.1
OS: Embedded QNAP-Linux

[nickvergessen]

Yeah the app was migrated to the new email templating system. Not sure if that allows theming yet.

What would youblike to change? Wording or styling?

[BenS89]

Wording. I temporarily fixed it with changing the corresponding strings within the.js / .json files

[nickvergessen]

You should be able to replace language files or parts of them with theming as well

[phatair]

Hi,
i would like to change the logo "custom cloud" in the mail notification. How can i do this?
Thanks for your help.

[nickvergessen]

That's a server side issue, see nextcloud/server#5036

[elpraga]

Which files should I edit when I want to modify the default email being sent @nickvergessen ? The default template uses .svg images, which would be fine, if google wasn't blocking all svg in gmail. I would like to change them to .png equivalents, so that users can actually see them.

[nickvergessen]

That issue is being worked on in nextcloud/server#5075

[elpraga]

Thanks!

[ams-tschoening]

Yeah the app was migrated to the new email templating system. Not sure if that allows theming yet.

Where can I found more info about that new templating system and how it interacts with other apps? Are the only available infos these in the docs? Those don't explain much about integration with other apps, how different templates are distinguished from each other etc. I need to know how e.g. the activity app generates mails and how I can customize those entirely. I can't even find code in the app implementing IEMailTemplate, only very few mentions of similar names like the following:

$template = $this->mailer->createEMailTemplate('activity.Notification', [

But those calls don't explain where templates/classes/... need to be stored to customize things.

[ams-tschoening]

I've found how individual templates are distinguished: activity.Notification from the example above is the requested template and while it's not documented pretty well, that name is forwarded as $emailId to implementations of IEMailTemplate:

public function __construct(Defaults $themingDefaults,
				IURLGenerator $urlGenerator,
				IFactory $l10nFactory,
				$emailId,
				array $data) {
	$this->themingDefaults = $themingDefaults;
	$this->urlGenerator = $urlGenerator;
	$this->l10nFactory = $l10nFactory;
	$this->htmlBody .= $this->head;
	$this->emailId = $emailId;
	$this->data = $data;
}

The support portal has a freely accessible example app in which that $emailId is used to distinguish things:

public function addBodyButtonGroup(
	string $textLeft, string $urlLeft,
	string $textRight, string $urlRight,
	string $plainTextLeft = '',
	string $plainTextRight = '') {

	// for the welcome email we omit the left button ("Install client") and only show the button that links to the instance
	if ($this->emailId === 'settings.Welcome') {
		parent::addBodyButton($textLeft, $urlLeft, $plainTextLeft);
		return;
	}
	parent::addBodyButtonGroup($textLeft, $urlLeft, $textRight, $urlRight, $plainTextLeft, $plainTextRight);
}

email_template_example.zip

So in the end, there seems to ALWAYS be ONE implementation of IEMailTemplate set per instance of Nextcloud only, because there's only one global config in config.php to do so. The attached example app seems to set that option automatically when enabling/disabling the app already using classes in lib/Migration.

'mail_template_class' => '\OC\Mail\NameOfYourEmailTemplate'

Though being an instance wide implementation, that is able to distinguish differently requested mails for different purposes by the given $emailId and can dispatch to different additional implementations this way. Of course one needs to know which different purposes exist and stuff like that and I couldn't find any documentation for that yet. I guess the easiest way to find what one might be interested in is by searching the code base for createEMailTemplate.