We've used a custom TNEW order confirmation e-mail, generated via SQL and dependent on SOAP, since late 2012, and are seeing the end of the life of that particular process approaching with the arrival of v16. This has set our minds to wondering:
While we have some time, we are interested in considering just about any option.
Missing seeing some of you at TLCC and talking about stuff like this...
I've made a few posts recently in the Ticketing & Customer Service forum about my explorations in this area -- this thread elaborates a bit on the technical setup I've come up with: https://community.tessituranetwork.com/tessitura_software_forums/f/tessitura_ticketing-0/26935/pre-show-email-via-html-template
I'm pretty happy with the overall infrastructure and scheduling -- I'm not taking over completely from the SOAP TNEW confirmation, but I'm adding post-order confirmations to specific events via HTML templates. And rather than figure out how to actually design an email using the HTML Templates editor, I've just figured out how to "outsource" the HTML generation to the WordFly editor -- this is described in more detail at the link above.
Where I think the whole system is lacking is in the design authoring stage, unfortunately. I've started dreaming up scenarios where one could use the Razor template to generate an intermediate markup language like MJML or HEML, and then register a service interceptor on the Templates/Render/* endpoints which would run the appropriate post-processing transformations to generate client-safe email HTML from that intermediate language. I just don't think any of us should have to be writing table-based HTML with inlined styles by hand in 2021.
Nick Reilingh said:I just don't think any of us should have to be writing table-based HTML with inlined styles by hand in 2021.
Agreed.