Unofficial Spiceworks

As mentioned yesterday Spiceworks have already started work on 4.1, Shade is busy putting together some great new email notifications.

I’ve been taking a hard look at the help desk notification emails and here’s what I’m learning…

• The formatting makes it hard for end users to really see what’s going on.
• Admins want to be able to do some level of “branding” easily within the emails.
• There are too many templates and it’s not clear which template will be used.
• Subject lines aren’t very informative.
• In short: They’re not very usable.

Read the rest of his post

There are a few drastic changes from the old notification emails that you should be aware of before starting:

• There are no longer separate templates for different types of events.
• Instead, there are 2 templates: HTML and Plain Text.
• There’s a much more powerful template language for building the emails (http://www.liquidmarkup.org/). This language will allow you to do things that you couldn’t before (if/else, for, date formatting, text formatting, etc.)
• Admin and User notifications will be formatted from the same template. Sections of the template can be turned on or off optionally using the liquid templates.

Its an exciting change and one that will help bring in more people to use Spiceworks, you will be able to put your own images on the HTML emails as well as lay them out on in your corporate way.