django-email-from-template — send emails generated entirely from Django templates

email_from_template generates and sends mail defined in Django templates to avoid presentation layer violations. It has the following features:

• HTML email support
• Context processor system
• Support for non-Django template rendering systems

Whilst Django provides a comprehensive mail framework that simplifies the sending mechanics of email, the typical use of it is often ugly and results in unnecessary and complicated string formatting inside views:

from django.core.mail import send_mail
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
from django.contrib.sites.models import Site

# Shouldn't be in views.py
send_mail(
    'Hi %s, %d %s written on your wall' % (
        user.username,
        num_posts > 1 and 'people have' or 'person has',
    ),
    'Hi %s\n\nCheck out what they wrote here:\n\n %s%s\n\n' % (
        user.username,
        Site.objects.get_current(),url,
        reverse('profile:view', args=(user.username,)),
    ),
    'from@example.com',
    [user.email],
    fail_silently=False,
)

With django-email-from-template, you can relegate all this formatting to the presentation layer as well as leverage any existing templatetags and filters. First we define our template:

{% extends email_from_template %}

{% block subject %}
Hi {{ user.username }}, {{ num_posts }} {{ num_posts|pluralize:"person has,people have" }} written on your wall
{% endblock %}

{% block body %}
Hi {{ user.username }}.

Check out what they wrote here:

  {{ site.url }}{% url profile:view user.username %}
{% endblock %}

We then simply call our template-aware version of send_mail with the appropriate context:

from email_from_template import send_mail

send_mail([user.email], 'path/to/my_email.email', {
    'user': user,
    'num_posts': num_posts,
}, 'from@email.com')

Now your views are not cluttered with unnecessary presentation logic.

For HTML-enabled mail readers, we can optionally include suitable content within a “html” block:

{% block html %}
<p>Hi <strong>{{ user.username }}</strong></p>
<p>Check out what they wrote here:</p>
<a href="{{ site.url }}{% url profile:view user.username %}">
    {{ site.url }}{% url profile:view user.username %}
</a>
{% endblock %}

Context processors

The EMAIL_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS setting is a tuple of callables that return a dictionary of items to merged into the email context. It is identical to the functionality of Django’s regular TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS support except that the callables do not take a request object.

By default, EMAIL_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS is set to:

(
    'email_from_template.context_processors.debug',
    'email_from_template.context_processors.django_settings',
)

debug

Module: email_from_template.context_processors.debug Enabled by default: True

Sets debug in the template context to the value of settings.DEBUG:

def debug():
    from django.conf import settings
    return {'debug': settings.DEBUG}

django_settings

Module: email_from_template.context_processors.django_settings Enabled by default: True

Sets settings in the template context to the value of Django’s settings object, django.conf.settings:

def django_settings():
    from django.conf import settings
    return {'settings': settings}

site

Module: email_from_template.context_processors.site Enabled by default: False

Sets site in the template context to the value of the current django.contrib.sites Site instance:

def site():
    from django.contrib.sites.models import Site
    return {'site': Site.objects.get_current()}

i18n

Module: email_from_template.context_processors.i18n Enabled by default: False

Includes LANGUAGES, LANGUAGE_CODE and LANGUAGE_BIDI in the template context. This email context processor is parallel to the django.core.context_processors.i18n template context processor:

def i18n():
    from django.utils import translation
    return {
        'LANGUAGES': settings.LANGUAGES,
        'LANGUAGE_CODE': translation.get_language(),
        'LANGUAGE_BIDI': translation.get_language_bidi(),
    }

Configuration

EMAIL_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS

A tuple of callables that return a dictionary of items to merged into the email context. See the Context processors section for more details.

EMAIL_RENDER_METHOD

Default: django.template.loader.render_to_string

Method to use to actually render templates. If you are using the Coffin Jinja2 adaptor for Django, you should set this coffin.template.loader.render_to_string.

Installation

Add email_from_template to your INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'email_from_template',
    ...
)

Links

View/download code

https://github.com/playfire/django-email-from-template

File a bug

https://github.com/playfire/django-email-from-template/issues