[ZendTo] An update for HTML email templates and body tag

[Jules Field]

On 17/01/2019 16:57, Travis Zimmerman via ZendTo wrote:
> We encountered a weird problem that only occurs when forwarding or 
> replying to emails from ZendTo using Thunderbird. The background color 
> from body defined in local.css would get applied to the message from 
> the person forwarding or replying. At my university that means the 
> background was set to a dark garnet, which makes black text hard to 
> read. So this sent me down a whole rabbit hole of looking at the HTML 
> email templates, which brings up two changes that I think would be 
> great for ZendTo.
>
> 1) Set the body tag in the website code (header.tpl) and emails 
> (email_header_html.tpl) to have id=“zendtobody” or whatever you would 
> like to name the id for the body css. It would mean local.css needs a 
> minor change from body to #zendtobody. All around I think a pretty 
> easy minor change that clears up the weird Thunderbird interaction.
Ah, yes. Just had a look at email_header_html.tpl. The CSS defined at 
the top of the file gets totally ignored by quite a lot of things that 
render emails. Hence the duplication, as by the time I had got something 
that worked (with all the styling defined directly in the tags) I didn't 
have the patience to carefully remove the definitions at the top and 
check it all still worked correctly. It worked, that was good enough. 
Exasperating is not the word I would choose, but it gets you in the 
right general direction.

Cheers,
Jules.
>
> 2) I’ve attached some edits I made to email_header_html.tpl and 
> email_footer_html.tpl. My uni’s gold logo looked a bit off on the grey 
> background so I changed it to match the garnet we use on the website, 
> which is when I realized that the email style was set manually instead 
> of using the local.css that it imports and that the rounded corners 
> were images. So I made changes to the templates to use fully use the 
> local.css branding and I converted one of the tables into divs and set 
> the content div (#container) to have rounded corners without using 
> images. Let me know what you think, I think I managed to keep the 
> design you created but made it to automatically use the branding we 
> define in the local.css. I only had my uni logo and the default ZendTo 
> logo to test against, so I didn’t get to do an extensive amount of 
> testing.
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Travis Zimmermantzimmerman at fsu.edu <mailto:tzimmerman at fsu.edu>850-645-8030
> Linux Enterprise Applications & Systemsits-linuxadmins at fsu.edu 
> <mailto:its-linuxadmins at fsu.edu>
> Information Technology Services, Florida State University
>
>
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Jules

-- 
Julian Field MEng CEng CITP MBCS MIEEE MACM

How to stop time: kiss.
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www.Zend.To
Twitter: @JulesFM

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