README

The Laravel Mail Template Engine makes it possible to create mail templates for your transactional mails. These mail templates can hold content and recipient variables which can be filled when triggering the mail.

This package works together with our Laravel Nova Mail Editor that provides a UI to let content managers edit translations.

How it works

The packages combines 3 different sets of data to send a transactional mail.

Firstly there is the Mail class: here you define a name, content variables and recipient variables.
Next up you store your mail templates in your database, you can do this in Nova using Laravel Nova Mail Editor. Or you write your own interface to save the templates.
Finally, you call the mail class and fill in its variables (content and recipient). At this moment the engine will look for all templates using this class, starts filling them with the provided variables and send them to the selected recipients.

Installation

Install using composer:

composer require statikbe/laravel-mail-template-engine

Publish the mail template migration and config

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=mail-template-engine

Run the mail template migration

php artisan migrate

How to use

The mail class

This class will decide what content variables are available in your mail template and will be used to decide when a mail is send.

You can generate a mail with the following command

php artisan make:mail-class SomeEventMail

After creating a Mail class, add them to the config mail-template-engine.php mails.

An example of a Mail class can be found at src/Mails/ResetPassword.php.

<?php

namespace Statikbe\LaravelMailEditor\Mails;

use Statikbe\LaravelMailEditor\AbstractMail;

class ResetPasswordMail extends AbstractMail
{
    public static function name(){
        return __('ResetPasswordTemplate');
    }

    public static function getContentVariables(){
        return [
            'url' => __('Reset password URL'),
        ];
    }

    public static function getRecipientVariables(){
        return [
            'user' => __('User'),
        ];
    }
}

The Mail Templates

Mail templates are stored in the database. This uses the model Statikbe\LaravelMailEditor\MailTemplate and can be created like any other model. A mail template can be localized, we use Spatie's translatable package for this to work. More information can be found on their page: Laravel Translatable.

You can use the keys from your corresponding mail_class to place variable data inside the mail template.

The MailTemplate model consists off:

Name	Type	Description	Example
mail_class	string	A mail class from config `mail-template-engine.mails`	verify-email
name	string	Just a descriptive naming of the mail for an index page	Email verification mail
subject	json (translatable)	The subject, fillable with `ContentVariables` from the corresponding Mail Class	{"en": "Welcome [[name]], please verify your email"}
body	json (translatable)	The body, fillable with `ContentVariables` from the corresponding Mail Class	{"en": "Welcome [[name]], please verify your email using the following url [[url]]."}
sender_name	json (translatable)	The sender by name	{"en": "Statik"}
sender_email	json (translatable)	The sender by email	{"en": "info@statik.be"}
recipients	json	The recipients of the mail, an array filled with both `RecipientVariables` from the Mail Class and/or plain emails	["user","general@email.com"]
cc	json	The cc of the mail, an array filled with both `RecipientVariables` from the Mail Class and/or plain emails	["user","general@email.com"]
bcc	json	The bcc of the mail, an array filled with both `RecipientVariables` from the Mail Class and/or plain emails	["user","general@email.com"]
attachments	json (translatable)	work in progress
design	string	A design from config `mail-template-engine.designs`	statikbe::mail.designs.default
render_engine	string	A render engine from config `mail-template-engine.render_engines`	html
created_at	timestamp
updated_at	timestamp
deleted_at	timestamp

If your application is using Nova you can use Nova Mail Editor: a tool for editing and creating mail templates.

Calling the mail class

In order to send mails you provide the content and recipient variables, and then send Mail object.
The mail object will now look for any mail template in the database using this Mail class, build it and send the mail.

An example:

use Statikbe\LaravelMailEditor\Mails\ResetPasswordMail;

$contentVars = [
    'nl' => [ //Optional wrap with locale
        'url' => $verificationUrl,
    ],
];
$recipientVars = [
    'user' => [
        //Use an array with mail and optional locale
        [ 
            'mail' => $user->email, 
            'locale' => 'en',
        ],
        //Or use an object
        $user 
    ]
];

$attachments = [
    'nl' => [ //Optional wrap with locale
        'user' => [ 
            //Using laravel mail attach functionality
            [ 
                'path' => $path, 
                'options' => [
                    'as' => 'factuur.pdf',
                    'mime' => 'application/pdf',
                ] 
            ],
            //Or add an entire file
            $file 
        ],
    ]
];

$mail = new ResetPasswordMail();
$mail->sendMail($contentVars, $recipientVars);

Content variables

In this array you assign the values to each key used in the mail template(s). You define the recipients in getContentVariables in your mail class. Wrapping the content variables with a locale as key is optional.

Recipient variables

In this array you assign the mail and locale for each recipient in the mail template(s). You define the recipients in getRecipientVariables in your mail class. For more options on how to add the recipient variables look at \Statikbe\LaravelMailEditor\AbstractMail::formatRecipientArray.

Attachment variables

In this array you assign the attachment for each recipient in the mail template(s). You define the recipients in getRecipientVariables in your mail class. For more options on how to add the recipient variables look at \Statikbe\LaravelMailEditor\AbsractMail::formatRecipientArray. Wrapping the attachments with a locale as key is optional.

Styling

The default design provided by the package comes from here. You can publish the views and customise it all you want!

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Statikbe\LaravelMailEditor\MailEditorServiceProvider" --tag=views

You can provide your own designs by adding them to the designs array in the config. Designs are view directories where you store the views for your render engines, F.E. the default HTML engine expects a view called html.blade.php.

Configuration

You can publish the configuration by running this command:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=mail-template-engine

The following configuration fields are available:

TODO document configuration

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see license file for more information.

statikbe / laravel-mail-template-engine

Maintainers

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