HotDoodle Support

Customize Emails

HotDoodle allows emails to be personalized for the receiver using personalization fields. The substitutions available for email are essentially the same whether the email is sent from an inbox or from a posting to a bulletin board. Note that the message saved in the bulletin board or in the sender's inbox will not have the fields replaced, the substitution occurs when the email is prepared. The basic syntax is [$var] but with curly brackets “{}” instead of straight “[]” brackets. (We must substitute square brackets in this user guide to avoid substitutions.)

If the email is being sent from a form, the fields from the form are placed in a variable called $fields. So you might refer to values such as [$fields.firstname] and [$fields.email] provided that the form included fields called first name and email. If a variable is incorrectly implemented, a red error message will appear, requiring the message to be corrected.

Items sent in email have a variable $user that has values that change for each email recipient. Review the table below explaining how to implement variable for personalized messages.

Field	Explination	Example (square brackets)	Example (real syntax)
id	Internal number uniquely identifying the user. Is not useful except possibly as an argument to a link.	[$user.id]	{$user.id}
username	The user's login string, which is often their email address.	[$user.username]	{$user.username}
firstname	The firstname entered during user registration	[$user.firstname]	{$user.firstname}
lastname	The lastname entered during user registration	[$user.lastname]	{$user.lastname}
email	Their email address	[$user.email]	{$user.email}
email_subscribe	What happens when they personally subscribe to something. Value is numeric 0-3 and matches the values in the pulldown in my-account for "My subscriptions should". This field is not very useful in email customization.	[$user.email_subscribe]	{$user.email_subscribe}
email_recv	What happens when they are in a group that is subscribed to something. Value is numeric 0-3 and matches the values in the pulldown in my-account for "My subscriptions should". This field is not very useful in email customization.	[$user.email_recv]	{$user.email_recv}
email_html	Is 1 if the user gets email in HTML format, is 0 otherwise. This field is not very useful in email customization.	[$user.email_html]	{$user.email_html}
email_show	Is 1 if the user allows others to see their email address. This field is not very useful in email customization.	[$user.email_show]	{$user.email_show}
pending	Is 1 if the user is from an imported list and has not yet interacted with HotDoodle in a manner that confirms that they are OK with receiving the emails.	[$user.pending]	{$user.pending}