CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

When creating and saving an email template, the template includes the subject of the email. I think this is not good because while a template stays the same (layout and some text), an email subject is very context sensitive and varies depending on what you're emailing about.

What I'm proposing is that email templates should save the body of your message like it does now but the subject should not be a part of your template and be left blank by default for every mailing.

The behavior now is that you enter a subject on step 3, go down to the body, select the template, and it overrides what you wrote for the subject with the subject of the mailing you used when you initially created the template. Easily creating the scenario of you sending the mailing with an inappropriate subject.

What do people think about this?

This applies to 2.2.x and 3.0

Thanks
Tony

Hi Peter. You are allowed in CiviMail to manually override the subject the template inserts. The problem is that the template overwrites what you entered as the subject (if any). So there are a couple of issues:

1. The UI is confusing. As you work your way down the form (step 3 of civimail in particular but also true for "send email to contacts"), the second thing (after setting the from address) you enter is subject. When you select the template next, the template inserts content into the body AND overwrites whatever you entered as the subject above.

2. I think this shouldn't happen at all for the reasons I listed below.

Hope this helps
Tony

Hi Peter. I don't think so. The subject should be the second thing (after the from address) you select.

It turns out there is a workaround. If you go to the message templates section in administer civicrm, /civicrm/admin/messageTemplates?reset=1&action=browse you can edit a template and since here subject is optional, you can remove the subject from the template avoiding the problem I mentioned before.

I still think when creating templates during the create mailing workflow, a saved template should not save the subject used when creating the template. But good to know there is a workaround.

thanks
Tony