Preview Email v3.0.3

The Order Confirmation preview now reflects a customized includes/classes/order.php.

If your store has changed how order.php builds the confirmation email — for example a wholesale store that leads each line with the product's model/SKU — the preview renders the product and totals rows from your store's own order.php, so what you see matches what your customers receive. A store running stock Zen Cart is unaffected: it uses the stock-faithful rendering, and nothing is evaluated.

How it works: the preview reads your store's own order.php and, when its product-line markup differs from stock, evaluates that file's own line-building expressions against a recent order. It only ever evaluates a string-concatenation expression taken from your own, already-trusted order.php (never any request input), and falls back to the stock rendering on anything unexpected.

Install / upgrade: upload zc_plugins/PreviewEmail/v3.0.3/ and upgrade in place through Modules > Plugin Manager.

Raised by Scott C. Wilson.

Preview Email v3.0.2

The Order Confirmation preview now reproduces the confirmation email byte-for-byte: the product row, the option/value attribute lines, the one-time-charges row and the totals are exactly what order::send_order_email() builds. This corrects two places the rebuild had quietly diverged, and a made-up attribute format that showed option prices the real email never includes.

A parity guard in the test suite reads includes/classes/order.php from a running store, evaluates core's own markup expressions, and fails if the preview ever stops matching — verified identical across Zen Cart 1.5.8 through 3.0.0. Raised by Scott C. Wilson.

Also normalizes line endings to LF.

Install / upgrade: upload zc_plugins/PreviewEmail/v3.0.2/ and it upgrades in place through Modules > Plugin Manager.

Preview Email v3.0.1

Fixes the Order Confirmation preview blanking on pickup, virtual and other orders that have no delivery address. Those orders set the delivery address to false; the preview now shows it as n/a, the same as the confirmation email Zen Cart actually sends for them.

Nothing else changed. The product lines (including the model number, which core does include) are unchanged.

Install / upgrade: upload zc_plugins/PreviewEmail/v3.0.1/ and it upgrades in place from 3.0.0 through Modules > Plugin Manager.

Reported by Scott C. Wilson.

Preview Email v3.0.0

Changelog

All notable changes to this project are recorded here. This project follows
Semantic Versioning.

[3.0.0] — 2026-09-09

A rewrite. Versions 1.x and 2.x, by Scott C. Wilson (That Software Guy), were
files copied into the admin directory plus an SQL patch, and previewed the
twelve Zen Cart emails that have template files. 3.0.0 is an encapsulated
zc_plugin with a different scope: every email the store can send, not just
the ones with templates.

Added

• Every core email. The store copies of the order, welcome, coupon, gift
  certificate and status emails (the _extra modules, with the extra-info
  block core adds), the low stock notice, Ask a Question, the pending-review
  notice, the newsletter, the admin password reset, the admin sign-in code,
  the admin-account-changed notice and payment module alerts. Every module
  name zen_mail() is called with in Zen Cart 2.2.2 has an entry.
• Add-on emails, found automatically. Any installed plugin can ship an
  email_preview/ directory of definition files and they appear in their own
  group. A store describes its own custom emails the same way, in
  <admin>/includes/email_preview/. Definitions are bundled for Social
  Contact Footer, Admin Add Customer, Fraud Screen, Back in Stock (both the
  Ceon and the simple add-on) and Recover Cart Sales (single and drip).
• Unclaimed templates. Any email_template_*.html no definition uses is
  listed under "Other templates found" and previewed with generic content.
• Plain-text preview. The text part, derived the way zen_mail() derives
  it on every supported release, including the disclaimers it appends to
  non-transactional mail. It is what a TEXT-Only customer receives.
• Test sends. Any email to any address, as HTML or plain text. The
  format is forced for that one send through core's own
  NOTIFY_EMAIL_DETERMINING_EMAIL_FORMAT notifier, so an address the store
  does not know (which core would send plain text) can still get the HTML.
  Tests go through the store's real transport and settings.
• Social Contact Footer placeholder header. SCF sends its emails with a
  blank spacer where the header image goes until one is uploaded on its
  Subscribers page. The preview and test send show a placeholder banner that
  says so instead, so nobody mistakes the blank for the finished email.
• Hooks for other plugins. Six notifiers fired through the admin
  notifier: definitions loaded, message built, an unknown page action, extra
  row buttons, a page-top box, and extra preview-strip lines. Documented in
  docs/CUSTOMIZING.md; Preview Email Pro builds on them.
• The stylesheet named. The preview strip names the email_common.css
  core pours into the template, and says when the template carries rules of
  its own or the template or message content uses inline styles, since those
  win over the stylesheet.
• Unfilled placeholders flagged. The preview strip lists every
  $PLACEHOLDER the template names that nothing filled. Core leaves them in
  the sent email as literal text.
• Status strip showing whether sending and HTML are on, the transport,
  and the template directory, so a test that does not arrive is explained
  before it is sent.
• Invented sample data when the store has no customers, orders, products
  or coupons yet, instead of the old "create some orders and try again".
• Language files loaded directly, both lang.*.php arrays and legacy
  define() files, honoring the template override folder, without relying
  on the admin language loader (Zen Cart 3.0.0 dropped define-file loading).

Changed

• Installed through Plugin Manager; the 1.x/2.x SQL patch is no longer
  needed, and its previewEmail menu row is removed on install so a store
  upgrading from the old copy does not get two entries.
• The page moved from Customers to Tools > Preview Email.
• Sample records are chosen from the last twenty at random, as before, but
  from a query that never walks off the end of a short result set.

Kept

• direct_test.html in the catalog root still supplies the body of the
  direct-email preview.
• A custom_preview_email.php defining preview_email_custom() still runs
  after every build, so an existing site customization keeps working.
• The Back in Stock and Recover Cart Sales previews, now self-guarding so
  they appear only when those add-ons are present.

Versions 1.x and 2.x

See https://github.com/scottcwilson/zencart_preview_email.