Customize the way the content inserted in emails by plugins
Last updated
Last updated
In AcyMailing, when creating your newsletter, you should see that it is possible to automatically insert Joomla articles in the newsletter thanks to a simple tag. You can also add to AcyMailing to be able to also insert elements from other components, such as JEvents, HikaShop, VirtueMart, Seblod, etc...
Since AcyMailing 4.9.4, you can select the format you want the elements to be displayed, you can also create your own layout to have an unlimited capacity to customise the way the elements are inserted in your newsletters.
When inserting the Joomla articles in your newsletter, you should see a new option named "Format". This option will enable you to choose exactly how the articles should be displayed in your newsletter. For now, this feature is only available for the Joomla article insertion, but we planned to also add it on all our content plugins, one by one.
As you can see, you'll now be able to choose within one of the 8 proposed formats, displaying the title, main picture and description as you select.
Yellow line: element's title
Blue square: Main element's picture, please note that it is not resized by default to fit the size it has on the example above, so you'll have to use our resize option or to apply some CSS style in the AcyMailing template you're using
Black lines: obviously the element's description, wraped using the wrap option (if available in the plugin)
If one or several custom templates are available for the plugin you're using, it will be available above the 8 default formats: you could then apply your custom templates individually to your tags.
The last feature available for this option is the button you can see at the bottom-left of the format option box: this button is only available when inserting a tag that could be replaced by more that one element.
If this option is enabled, the elements will be inserted alternatively with the image on a side then the other, for example if you select the second format and activate this option you'll get something like this:
Here are the formats alternatively used when you activate this option:
As you can see, if you choose one of the two formats at the bottom-left, the "Alternate" option won't do anything.
We added the possibility to create a custom template from the plugin's configuration. This way, you'll not have to create it by FTP and the file will be added at the right place, with the right name. As for the "Format" option, this feature will be added in our existing plugins, one by one.
In the AcyMailing configuration page, tab "Plugins", edit the tag plugin you want to override, you should see a "Custom template" button. Click on it and a popup should appear like this:
The first time you'll open it, the text area will be empty, you'll have to put your custom template here like in this example. Of course, the available tags ({title}, {introtext}, {fulltext}, etc...) will not be the same depending on the plugin you override, you can then click on the "Help" button to get the corresponding plugin's documentation, with an example of custom template at the end.
As the "Custom template" button was added recently, it is not yet available in all our tag plugins. In some cases, you could also need to create a second custom template as you can now assign a custom template to a specific tag.
Create a file in the the folder media / com_acymailing / plugins (if the "plugins" folder does not exists, please create it first). The name of the file should begin by your plugin's file name, for example tagcontent_template_2.php for the Joomla article tag plugin.
If this file is available on your server, AcyMailing will display it in the "Format" option when creating your tag
To know what you can use in the custom template, you can refer to the corresponding documentation.
