[wp-hackers] Enhanced E-Mails needs testing

[John Blackbourn]

On 21 August 2011 21:49, Wojtek Szkutnik <wojtek.szkutnik at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd like to chime in - it's a really exciting project, but since we have
> released the last version recently, it wasn't tested as thoroughly as we'd
> like it to be. There is probably a lot of polishing to do, but I'll be happy
> to work on it as long as there is place for improvements. Now that GSoC is
> almost over, I have scheduled part of my time for developing this project
> further - any suggestions are highly welcome!

1. I noticed in the changelog for 0.2 one of the changes was "Removed
output buffering". I presume the first version of the plugin used
regular templates for the messages which were captured by an output
buffer. The current templates are much less user friendly as they have
to return the template in a string rather than just outputting markup.

What was the reason for switching away from output buffering? Was
there a performance issue? I ask because I would imagine if the
functionality of this plugin was rolled into core then themes should
be able to template the emails by including the email.php (and
email-foo-bar.php) templates just like regular theme templates. It
introduces inconsistency if the email templates have to return a
string instead of just outputting the markup. You've probably already
discussed all this, but this is my feedback anyway! :)

2. The documentation should mention what the templates need to be
named for each of the various email notifications used in WordPress (I
had to look at the source of each of the functions in the plugin's
pluggable.php to find out).

3. The template hierarchy appears to search for templates in this
order (using 'email-newuser-admin' as an example):

 * email-newuser-admin.php
 * email-newuser.php
 * email.php

It would be good if it also searched for email-admin.php before
searching for email.php, thus allowing a theme to simply define two
generic templates, email-user.php and email-admin.php (which may well
be styled completely differently as one is intended for admins and one
for users). Thoughts?

John