Move remaining "generated by Tendenci" footer text to template.

[BenSturmfels]

Extending upon 2b2e6f8, this change replacing the remaining hard-coded email footer with templated text. This means that the same email footer is consistently used across the site and enable changes to the footer without forking Tendenci.

Note that the new email_footer.txt template is a text version of the existing email_footer.html, hence I've stuck with that wording rather than the existing wording in add_tendenci_footer.

[jennyq]

The footer was actually added there intentionally to promote the Tendenci brand. I'm not sure if it is okay to move it to a template. Let me check with @eschipul.

[eschipul]

I like the abstraction and keeping the HTML and code separate. But given we're a tiny virtual group that has not gone to crowdfunding or asked for donations, we have to pay the bills. Marketing is part of that solution.

What about moving it into a text file that is NOT in the templates folder but still in the repo? That would allow other developers to edit it but prevent our hosted clients who don't pay for email relay through SES from removing it.

Thoughts? Email is a big expense for us that clients don't understand so we do need the branding. And the image is actually supposed to be a beacon like Wordpress does so we can show stats within the sites for super_users.

[BenSturmfels]

Thanks @jennyq and @eschipul, I understand your points and certainly don't want to make it harder to market Tendenci.

I don't know that I have a better answer, but here are a few observations while I think about this further.

• branding is a very personal thing, and people want control of how they look to their constituents
• the current email footer + image is possibly a little long
• this promotion isn't so relevant to a large proportion of email recipients, and can be confusing
• it's hard to come up with language that works in all cases, eg. "association" may not be an appropriate word and "AMS" is meaningless to most readers
• most don't begrudge Tendenci this marketing
• some will still want full control and will need to remove it
• putting the footer in a template makes it possible to remove the footer, but doesn't mean everyone will

I suspect that if the footer were more modest, like:

<p>Sent from <a href="https://www.tendenci.com">Tendenci</a></p>

this might all be a non-issue, as it's very close to what comes out of many smartphones. The phase "powered by" seems a little cliche. Especially if there was a way to also add some organisational branding.

Thinking out aloud, I wonder whether maybe the system needs both:

1. An email footer template for the organisation's branding
2. A modest non-removable "Sent from Tendenci" footer

That's just my thoughts for now. Moving to a text file is certainly a step forward.

[BenSturmfels]

@eschipul I've now moved all the footers to the pair of html_footer() and text_footer() functions for use in Python code and added template tags of the same name for components that insert the footers using templates.

I think this is about as simple as I can get it, but does involve touching a bit of code - this approach is a little more complicated than straight template includes. I've tested each of these changes by hand.

[PaulSD]

Looks to me like the real issue here is simply that some things are using the email_footer.html template when they should be using add_tendenci_footer() ...

Rather than adding new functions and templatetags, why not just update everything to use add_tendenci_footer()?

[BenSturmfels]

@PaulSD I think that's a good approach so long as we just drop the footer off the three admin-recap templates. There's little value to these particular footers anyway, since admins already know they're running Tendenci. Refactoring these would mean I'd have to touch quite a bit of management command code that will be time consuming to test thoroughly by hand.

Will push up this change in a moment.

[PaulSD]

This looks better to me :)

BTW, to squash these multiple attempts into a single commit, you can do:
git reset --soft HEAD~5 # Forget the last 4 commits, but leave the changes in the working directory so you can re-commit
git stash # Temporarily save the working directory changes so you can strip out the changes related to your "merge with master" commit
git pull https://github.com/tendenci/tendenci.git # Rebase on the current master
git stash pop # Bring back your changes, ignoring the "merge with master" stuff which is no longer relevant
git commit -a # Commit your changes
git push --force # Overwrite your old commits with the new commit

[BenSturmfels]

@PaulSD I use GitLab a whole lot more that GitHub, but surely GitHub has a comparable "squash and rebase on merge" feature that the project committer can choose to use if that's their preference?

I'm of the philosophy that once a branch has gone public in any way, you don't rewrite it's history, to avoid creating a mess for anyone else following along.

[PaulSD]

Hmm... Yup, I guess it does: https://help.github.com/articles/about-pull-request-merges/

[jennyq]

The changes look fine except per @eschipul we really want to have the image link and the text in the email footer.

I have an idea: Let's move the hard-coded tendenci footer to a template tendenci_footer.html, but make this file a non-editable file in the theme editor. Basically, hide this file so that it is not accessible from web interface. Of course, you can easily change this file at server level. How does that sound?

[BenSturmfels]

@jennyq no problem, this sounds close to my original proposal, so I'll revert to that and add the image. I've made it a Base64 embedded image since most sensible email clients block remote image to prevent tracking.

Looks like this:

I could use your help with making the email_footer.html and email_footer.txt non-editable - I've had a bit of a look through the code and there are a few spots you'd need to block editing. Probably in tendenci/apps/theme_editor/utils.py:get_dir_list(), get_all_files_list() and possibly also views.py:edit_file() also to be sure. That's getting kinda complicated. Any thoughts?

[jennyq]

To hide the email_footer.html from theme editor, yes, in the get_all_files_list, I think you can just add this if statement right after the for loop for f in files: https://github.com/tendenci/tendenci/blob/master/tendenci/apps/theme_editor/utils.py#L193

if f not in ['email_footer.html']:

[AdamBark]

Not sure if there's a better place to put this but it's somewhat related. Spamassassin isn't a big fan of html only emails, would you accept patches to send multipart messages? The image can also affect the score but it sounds like you want to keep that in all instances.

[eschipul]

@AdamBark - I do want to reinstate the option of an html or text email option for the newsletter generator. I think open source is a tough business model so I'd like the default mention of the tendenci brand to remain. (a developer can remove this anyway as they aren't "pixels" and pull from the local site regardless.)

That would require checking the emails object to support text or html. And having a drop down in the newsletter generator to select one. And then generating all of the content.

But I agree with you. Re spam assassin, while this helpfile isn't directly applicable you can see what we have to do just to get spf records to work.
https://www.tendenci.com/help-files/tendenci-forms-email-notifications/

After SPF - I also highly recommend using dnsstuff.com to check your domain's configuration.

[BenSturmfels]

Closing this PR as it's not currently a priority.