Description
Is there any plans to introduce improvements to transactional email management?
Anyone who has worked with the transactional system to a moderate amount of depth understands that this area currently consumes an incredibly disproportionate amount of time to develop custom emails.
It is simply not practical to have transactional emails saved in the database, with one entry for each template that gets sent out. Making one simple change to all the templates requires each entry to be updated. So if you want to alter, say, font color, you have to run through each template and replace every inline style with the new value.
I have worked (in my spare time) on a module that introduces new backend sections for applying changes such as this globally across all templates; however, this essentially requires the store owner to completely bypass the default email template editor and work on the template files directly.
It would be great to see template variables (font-color, background color, link color, table size, etc) for this type of thing as well as separate templates for email header/footer (ie. make a change to header-email.phtml and have that be applied to all emails).
Additionally, I have built support into my email module that preprocesses the email through the "Premailer" API which converts all of your embedded styles into inline styles. This allows the development of the template to be much quicker since you can simply build your email template using embedded styles and before it is every processed by Magento, it converts these styles to inline. Massive time saver.
Email testing would also be great so that to actually generate/send an email to ensure design is accurate, we should be able to send a test email with placeholder values for variables that we can send directly from the backend without having to actually mimic the behavior required to generate the email as it would for a customer/user.