E-mail templates & alerts

ShopClass sends e-mail at almost every meaningful moment: account activation, listing validation, password resets, contact-form messages, comment notifications and saved-search alerts. All of them are editable.

Settings → E-mail templates.

Editing a template

Each template has a title — the subject line — and a body, per active language. As the admin notes, email templates are registered by the core and by installed plugins, so a plugin that sends mail adds its own here.

Templates use placeholders for the values filled in at send time — the user’s name, the listing title, the confirmation link. Keep the placeholders. A template missing its link placeholder sends an activation e-mail nobody can act on, and the send still looks successful.

There is a send action for trying a template against a real address. Use it after editing, especially on the activation and password-reset templates: those two are the ones that lock people out when they are wrong.

The templates that matter most

Template	Why it matters
Account activation	A user who never gets this cannot register.
Listing validation	A seller who never gets this has an invisible listing.
Password reset	The only self-service route back in.
Contact publisher	The message that makes the marketplace work at all.
Alerts	Saved-search notifications — the thing that brings users back.

Notifications to you

Several settings decide when the admin gets mail:

• Listings → Settings → notify admin when a new listing is added
• Users → Settings → when a new user is registered
• Settings → Comments → Notifications — when a comment is posted, and when one is held for moderation

All of these are useful in week one and unbearable at volume. Turn them off when the site is busy and moderate from the admin lists instead.

Alerts and cron

Saved-search alerts are not sent when a listing is published. They are sent by cron, on the schedule each user picked for their saved search — hourly, daily or weekly.

That means the single most common report — “my users never get alerts” — is almost always a missing crontab entry, not a mail problem. Check it first:

php oc-cli.php doctor          # reports cron freshness

See setting up cron.

Alerts themselves are managed at Users → Alerts, where you can see, enable, disable and delete users’ saved searches.

When e-mail does not arrive

Work through it in this order:

1. Is it a cron e-mail? Alerts and anything scheduled need cron running.
2. Is SMTP configured? PHP’s default mail() usually lands in spam — see mail server.
3. Is the domain authenticated? SPF, DKIM and DMARC for the sending address.
4. Is the template intact? A broken template can produce mail that arrives but is useless.
5. Check the spam folder before concluding nothing was sent.