Lesson 41. Orders — Email Templates Editor

Starting with version 4.4.1, CS-Cart php shopping cart template comes with a built-in editor for the templates of email notifications. You can customize these templates according to your needs, or import the templates that were created and exported by someone else.

So, before we proceed, let’s go through the key features of the new editor for online shopping cart template:
1. Notification tabs. All notifications are now gathered in one place.
2. Add-on support. You can add new notifications and snippets with add-ons.
3. Easy notification editing. Coding skills are not required, just enter the data manually or use variables and snippets.
4. Preview. Preview and test emails features.
5. Code snippets. Code snippets are used to speed up the editing process.
6. Notification style. The style of notifications now match the style of your store.
7. Backward compatibility. Old templates are preserved so you don’t have to worry about them while moving from the old system to the new one.
8. The Import/Export feature.

Now let’s turn to the detailed overview of these features.

The php ecommerce template editor is available at the Design section of the Admin Panel. Here, three tabs are available — the Customer notifications tab, the Administrator notifications tab, and the Code snippets tab.

All default store notifications are gathered on the first two tabs.

You can edit the subject and the body of the notification. To make edits use variables and snippets Note that due to the lack of context test e-mails may differ from e-mails sent to customers and administrators.

The third tab contains code snippets. Code snippets are used to represent common elements of notifications such as headers and footers. On this tab you can create, delete, and edit snippets. Also snippets use styles of the currently applied theme. For example, if we take our default theme called Responsive and change its style from Modern to Facebook the style of snippets will change accordingly.

Each order status has its own notification. These notifications are found under the shared title of Order notification. Attach PDF files to order notifications to provide your customers full information about the order.

We also preserved the backward compatibility. The old templates that don’t have notifications for them will continue to work after the upgrade as supposed. The old templates can be found at Design -> Templates.

And last but not least in this e-commerce application functionality is the Import/Export feature. Add new and modify existing notifications and snippets with this new feature. Use the gear button located on the main page of the Editor to Import and Export notifications. The notifications are saved in .xml file for a simpler web store setup.