Community Manager Notifications: Overview

Overview information about email and Dashboard notifications for the Community Manager developer portal.

Customizing notification emails
Adding CSS and assets to a notification email
Notifications variables
Notification categories

Customizing notification emails

You can customize notification email templates by adding common elements of message format into separate variables and then reference them with a variable. One example of how we use this is to add the copyright notice in the email for a specific customer. This is done using the RESOURCES database table. Everything added to this table is available as variables that could be used in email templates.

For example, you could use the following as part of the email body for each email template:

{system.email.prefix}...body...content{system.email.suffix}

In this example:

system.email.prefix could have the <html><body><head>...everything in head...</head><body>...anything in the body before the actual text.
System.email.suffix could have the closing tags from the prefix, along with any other footer-related parts, then close <body> and <html> elements.

Adding CSS and assets to a notification email

To add CSS and assets to notification emails, load them in the developer platform to console resources using File Manager (More > Admin > File Manager) and then reference those URLs in the notification templates. You can use the resource version key in the URL so that browsers can cache them as well.

Note: If the assets are changed later, you'll need to modify the system.email.prefix in the RESOURCES table.

The modifications to the email templates must be done with database scripts. Below is an example.

In the below, replace the following values with values applicable to your installation: fedmemberid, company name, and company URL.

Note: In order for HTML markup to work, the parameter names (NAME column) must end with .html.

Prefix:

insert into RESOURCES (TENANTID, LOCALE, NAME, VALUE, LASTUPDDTS) values ((select TENANTID from TENANTS where FEDMEMBERID=fedmemberid), 'en_US', 'system.email.prefix.html', 
'<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" /></head>
<body class="">
<div>   Body content: <strong><a href="http://companyurl.com">Company Name</a></strong> 
 </div>', UTC_TIMESTAMP());

Suffix:

insert into RESOURCES (TENANTID, LOCALE, NAME, VALUE, LASTUPDDTS) values ((select TENANTID from TENANTS where FEDMEMBERID=fedmemberid), 'en_US', 'system.email.suffix.html', 
'<div>   Additional content in footer?: <strong><a href="http://companyurl.com">Company Name</a></strong> 
 </div>
</body>
    </html>', UTC_TIMESTAMP());

Notes:

Unless you have custom UI in place that displays the tenant name, the Name field in the TENANTS table is used only in email templates.
In versions 8.3 and later, the Site Admin can change the tenant name and other details of the tenant, in the Community Manager developer portal: Administration > Settings > Site.

Notifications variables

Below is a list of the variables used in notifications.

Note that just because a variable exists, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is available in a specific notification. Adding new variables to a notification might require product modification.

{alert.text}
{alert.title}
{api.name}
{api.version}
{app.name}
{app.version}
{author.email}
{author.name}
{author.username}
{business.name}
{comment.author}
{comment.text}
{contract.environment}
{contract.licenses} * (added recently)
{contract.oldstate}
{contract.policies}* (added recently)
{contract.state}
{end.date}

{expression.value}
{expression}
{group.name}
{groupmembership.oldrole}
{groupmembership.role}
{interval}
{invitation.code}
{invitation.text}
{invitedmember.email}
{invitedmember.name}
{invitedmember.username}
{modifier.username}
{password.resetcode}
{policy.name}
{post.text}
{post.title}
{review.text}
{review.title}

{signup.code}
{start.date}
{support.question}
{support.subject}
{system.email.footer.html}
{tenant.theme.console.address}
{tenant.contact.email}
{tenant.name}
{ticket.oldpriority}
{ticket.oldstate}
{ticket.priority}
{ticket.state}
{ticket.text}
{ticket.title}
{user.firstname}
{user.lastname}
{user.name}
{user.username}

Notification categories

Notifications for the Community Manager developer portal are grouped into categories. For details of the notifications available for each category, click through to the files in the Related Topics section below.