Templates

An email template is like any other django template. To use the template as an email, however, you must load the “email” templatetag library and use its tags to define the different parts of the email. The email templatetag library gives you three different tags to use: subject, body, and bodyhtml, each with their respective endsubject, endbody, and endbodyhtml.

For example

{% load email %}
{% subject %}Thank you for signing up!{% endsubject %}
{% body %}
Hello, {{ first_name }}.

Thank you for signing up. To find out more information, please visit
http://www.example.com/foo/.

Sincerely,
The Team
{% endbody %}
{% bodyhtml %}
Hello, <em>{{ first_name }}</em>.

Thank you for signing up.  To find out more information, click
<a href="http://www.example.com/foo/">here</a>.
{% endbodyhtml %}

Each tag is entirely optional. You can set any part of the email as you normally would with Djanog’s EmailMessage class.

Sending Email

The TemplateEmail class is a subclass of django.core.mail.EmailMultiAlternatives, which itself is a subclass of django.core.mail.EmailMessage.

To send your email template as an email, simply instantiate the TemplateEmail class while passing it your template and (optionally) a context dict:

from template_email import TemplateEmail

context = {'first_name': user.first_name}
email = TemplateEmail(template='email/confirmation_message.html', context)
email.send()

TemplateEmail Class

Of course, you may also extend the TemplateEmail class to suit your needs. The TemplateEmail class is initialized with optional keyword arguments of template and context. However, template and context variables may be overridden as a property as well. The TemplateEmail class has the following properties:

• template: The template used to render the email

• context: The context provided to the template

• subject: The subject of the email

• body: The plan-text body of the email

• html: The html to attach as an alternative type

The subject, body, and html properties are intended as defaults, and will be overridden by whatever is given in the template.

When you call the send() method, the TemplateEmail class first renders the given template into the different parts of the email. The templatetags simply dump their contents into temporary context variables for the render() method use. The render method then renders the contents of each tag separately into the class’s subject, body, and bodyhtml properties.

As a convienience, the send() method will automatically convert User model instances to email recipients, formatting them as “first_name last_name <email>”.