feat(mail): one shared transactional email layout, used by every email - #189
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Tiger had no email templates. Six bodies were hand-concatenated PHP strings and they had drifted badly: password reset and the sign-in code were styled inline, backup was barely styled, and signup verification, site registration and the SMTP test were bare <p> tags. The signup verification is the FIRST email a new customer ever receives, and it looked like a debug dump. Adds `Tiger_Mail::template($name, $vars)` — renders a content template into a shared `layout.phtml` and uses it as the HTML body. Plain-text is still derived automatically by send(), so deliverability is unchanged. Path cascade, lowest to highest: core -> app -> registered modules -> ACTIVE THEME. The theme sitting on top is the point: an operator rebrands every transactional email by dropping emails/*.phtml into their theme, no code change. `addTemplatePath()` lets a third-party module ship its own. The layout is written to EMAIL rules, not web rules, and the comments say why: table layout with role="presentation" (flex/grid are unusable in Outlook's Word renderer), styles INLINE (Gmail strips <head><style> in several contexts, so the <style> block carries only progressive extras — dark mode, small screens), 600px, and NO remote images (they're blocked by default and render as a broken box on first open, so the wordmark is live text). The CTA is a table-based bulletproof button with mso-padding-alt, since Word ignores padding on block elements. Migrated all six senders and deleted the now-dead _resetEmailHtml/_otpEmailHtml. Copy is preserved as-is — this restyles, it does not reword. A bug worth recording: Zend_View does NOT extract assigned variables into local scope, so the layout's bare `$content` produced a perfectly valid, perfectly EMPTY email — every template the identical byte size, no error raised. Nobody would notice until a customer received a blank password reset. Caught only by rendering the templates and looking at them; there is now a test that compares two rendered templates specifically to catch a layout that drops its content. Tests (+12): the body reaching the layout, templates producing different output, all six rendering, the email-client constraints (inlined styles, presentational tables, no flex/grid, no <img>), backup success vs failure, variable escaping, and the preheader being present-but-hidden. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WXgMENcwa4Q8yCJaHpjHpf
I hand-rolled the result as `out.className = 'small text-success'` + textContent, which is exactly what AGENTS.md says never to do — and it looked it: bare green text with no envelope, no dismiss, and no reveal. Now TigerDOM.notify owns it: themed alert with the success outline and fa-circle-check, revealed with the standard animation, dismissible by click (dismissOnClick) as well as the ✕. Errors STICK by notify's own default so a transport failure can actually be read; success auto-dismisses. Dropped the manual "Testing…" text — TigerButton.run already carries the in-flight state as a spinner, which is the house pattern. Values interpolated into the message are escaped (notify takes HTML): a provider's error text and the submitted address are both attacker-influenceable. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WXgMENcwa4Q8yCJaHpjHpf
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Why
Tiger had no email templates. Six bodies were hand-concatenated PHP strings, and they had drifted:
<p>tags<p>tags<p>tagsThe signup verification is the first email a new customer ever receives, and it looked like a debug dump.
What
Tiger_Mail::template($name, $vars)renders a content template into a sharedlayout.phtml. Plain-text is still auto-derived bysend(), so deliverability is unchanged.Path cascade (lowest → highest): core → app → registered modules → active theme. The theme on top is deliberate: an operator rebrands every transactional email by dropping
emails/*.phtmlinto their theme — no code change, nothing to keep in sync.addTemplatePath()lets a third-party module ship its own.Written to email rules, not web rules — and the comments say why, so nobody "modernizes" it later:
role="presentation"— flex/grid are unusable in Outlook's Word renderer<head><style>in several contexts, so the<style>block carries only progressive extras (dark mode, small screens)mso-padding-alt, since Word ignores padding on block elementsMigrated all six senders; deleted the now-dead
_resetEmailHtml/_otpEmailHtml. Copy is preserved — this restyles, it doesn't reword.A bug worth recording
Zend_View does not extract assigned variables into local scope, so the layout's bare
$contentproduced a perfectly valid, perfectly empty email — every template the identical byte size, no error raised. Nobody would notice until a customer got a blank password reset. Caught only by rendering the templates and looking at them.There's now a test that compares two rendered templates specifically to catch a layout that drops its content.
Tests
+12: body reaching the layout, templates producing genuinely different output, all six rendering with real content, the email-client constraints (inlined styles, presentational tables, no flex/grid, no
<img>), backup success vs failure, variable escaping, and the preheader being present-but-hidden.Full suite 2091, 0 failures, 15 deprecations (baseline). Coverage 72.7% (floor 72).
CAPABILITIES.mdcurrent.Not in scope
Email copy is still hardcoded English across all six — it was before this change too. Now that the bodies are templates rather than concatenated strings, keying them for the six locales is a clean follow-up.