As part of a recent project customising Magento emails I discovered a few useful bits and pieces that make creating custom transactional emails a little easier.

Static Blocks

I am not sure why I hadn’t thought of this but you can use static blocks in your emails in the same way as you would a CMS page. This is great because it allows you to make blocks that you can include in every email such as:
- Header
- Footer
- Promotional Content Area
- Social Links
etc and centrally manage it or allow the client to manage it rather than editing every email individually. The code you need is as follows:

{{block type="cms/block" block_id="email-header" template="cms/content.phtml"}}

You can place this code either in the emails you have setup within “system/transactional emails” or within your site directory “app/locale/en-us/template/email/email-file-name.html” with en-us being whatever locale you happen to be using.

Another cool thing about this is that you can easily upload images and include them within the static block admin screen rather than including the images in your theme. This makes it easy for clients to refresh certain sections themselves or write promotional content.

Referencing Store Information

Magento as standard references a few of the fields in the admin to populate the email eg. Store Name. However it is useful to also know that you can reference a lot more of the store information. For example if you are creating an email footer to state the stores name, address, telephone number, vat number etc you can pull all this information in dynamically so that your emails are kept up to date. The code required is:

Copyright: {{config path='design/footer/copyright'}}
Address: {{config path='general/store_information/address'}}
VAT No: {{config path='general/store_information/merchant_vat_number'}}
Telephone Number: {{config path='general/store_information/phone'}}
Email: {{config path='trans_email/ident_support/email'}}

and if you require anything else the easiest way to see how the field would be called is to browse to the section in the admin and inspect the field for its “name”. You would then write the code as follows:

{{config path=’tab in admin/sub section in admin/field name’}}

I have literally spent hours trying to set up mail on my localhost so that I can send test emails from Magento, and finally its working. So I thought I would share my solution in case it saves others wasted hours too

Firstly I needed to download the most recent release of sendmail. This can be found here: http://glob.com.au/sendmail/. Once downloaded browse to c:/xampp/sendmail (assuming your installation is on your c:/ drive) and delete and replace with the newly downloaded files.

Then in c:/xampp/sendmail/sendmail.ini comment everything out but the following lines and modify to be your own email address and password.

smtp_server=smtp.gmail.com
smtp_port=25
error_logfile=error.log
debug_logfile=debug.log
auth_username=youremail@gmail.com
auth_password=yourgmailpassword
force_sender=youremail@gmail.com

Then in c:/xampp/php/php.ini search for “mail” and comment out everything but sendmail_path and mail.add_x_header lines.

; For Win32 only.
; http://php.net/smtp
;SMTP = localhost
; http://php.net/smtp-port
;smtp_port = 25
 
; For Win32 only.
; http://php.net/sendmail-from
;sendmail_from = postmaster@localhost
 
; For Unix only.  You may supply arguments as well (default: "sendmail -t -i").
; http://php.net/sendmail-path
sendmail_path = "\"C:\xampp\sendmail\sendmail.exe\" -t"
 
; Force the addition of the specified parameters to be passed as extra parameters
; to the sendmail binary. These parameters will always replace the value of
; the 5th parameter to mail(), even in safe mode.
;mail.force_extra_parameters =
 
; Add X-PHP-Originating-Script: that will include uid of the script followed by the filename
mail.add_x_header = Off
 
; Log all mail() calls including the full path of the script, line #, to address and headers
;mail.log = "C:\xampp\apache\logs\php_mail.log"

Then restart Apache and it should work!!
To test you can place this script in your htdocs change the $to field and browse to it.

<?php
$to = "youremail@email.com";
$subject = "Test Email";
$message = "Testing mail is working";
 
if(mail($to,$subject,$message)){
echo "sent";
}else{
echo "failed";
}?>

Thank you to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4948687/xampp-sendmail-using-gmail-account for pointing me in the right direction