Demo of Send Mail Plugin

This is a working example of using the SendMailPlugin to send an e-mail when a user submits a form to vote on his/her favorite city.

Votes

How This Works

Voting is done with a custom CommentPlugin template defined below in this page. Two actions happen on form submit:

1. A new row is added to the voting table -- the output format is defined by the %TMPL:DEF{OUTPUT:vote_mail_comment}% comment plugin output template below.
2. Send an e-mail to the logged in user -- the e-mail is defined by the %SENDMAIL{}% variable, also located in the comment plugin output template below.

Some details:

• The "send e-mail" action is triggered by %SENDMAIL{ action="send" ... }%. We can't hard-code action="send" in this page because this would send an e-mail each time somone views the page! We set the action to be triggered only on form submit. There are two parts to this:
  1. The comment plugin input template has a hidden input field to tell the output template to do the send e-mail action:
     <input type="hidden" name="sendmailaction" value="send" />
  2. The comment plugin output template has :
     %SENDMAIL{ action="%URLPARAM{sendmailaction}%" ... }%
     On form submit, the "%URLPARAM{sendmailaction}%" resolves the "send", which initiates the send e-mail action.
• The CommentPlugin is designed to expand the same variables as TWiki does on a new topic creation. Plugin variables are not expanded, so we need to tell TWiki explicitely to expand the SENDMAIL variable. As documented, this can be done with a section of type="expandvariables" as follows:
  %STARTSECTION{ type="expandvariables" }%
%SENDMAIL{ ... }
%ENDSECTION{ type="expandvariables" }%
• The From, To and CC are defined by the following SENDMAIL parameters:
  from="$webmastername <$webmasteremail>" -- send e-mail as the TWiki administrator
  to="$username <$useremail>" -- send to currently logged in user
  cc="%WIKIWEBMASTER%" -- CC the TWiki administrator
  Note: Keep in mind that these parameters are ignored if defined in the {Plugins}{SendMailPlugin}{...} configure settings.
• The subject and e-mail body are defined in the subject="..." and text=".." parameters
• In case there is a send e-mail error, the error is recorded as a row in the voting table using the following parameter:
  onerror="| $error |||$n"

Comment Plugin Template

Comment plugin input template vote_mail_comment :

%TMPL:DEF{PROMPT:vote_mail_comment}%
<b>My favorite city:</b>
<noautolink>
<select name="vote">
<option value="">Select...</option>
<option>Amsterdam</option>
<option>Bern</option>
<option>London</option>
<option>New York</option>
<option>Rome</option>
<option>San Francisco</option>
<option>Tokyo</option>
<option>Zurich</option>
</select>
</noautolink>
<input %DISABLED% type="submit" value="%button|Vote%" class="twikiSubmit" />
<input type="hidden" name="sendmailaction" value="send" />
%TMPL:END%

Comment plugin output template vote_mail_comment :

%TMPL:DEF{OUTPUT:vote_mail_comment}%%POS:BEFORE%| %URLPARAM{ "vote" encode="safe" }% | %WIKIUSERNAME% | %SERVERTIME% |
%STARTSECTION{ type="expandvariables" }%%SENDMAIL{
 action="%URLPARAM{sendmailaction}%"
 from="$webmastername <$webmasteremail>"
 to="$username <$useremail>"
 cc="%WIKIWEBMASTER%"
 subject="Your vote on %WIKITOOLNAME%"
 text="Dear %WIKINAME%,

Thank you for your vote!
  * You selected: %URLPARAM{ "vote" encode="safe" }%

Best regards,
TWiki administrator team"
 onerror="| $error |||$n"
}%%ENDSECTION{ type="expandvariables" }%%TMPL:END%

See Also: CommentPlugin, SendMailPlugin, TWikiTemplates, SendMailPluginDemo

-- TWiki:Main.PeterThoeny