Email Templates

[Note]Note

This feature is NOT available on Akeeba Ticket System Core. The free of charge version will not send emails regardless of your options.

Joomla introduced its own Mail Templates feature in Joomla 4.0 released in August 2021. Akeeba Ticket System version 5.0 and later use this core Joomla feature to manage the templates of the e-mails it sends.

You can access Joomla's email templates manager through the System menu item, Templates tab, Mail Templates link. From the Filter Options of that page click on the - Select Extension - drop–down and select Akeeba Ticket System.

In case you need to reset the email templates to their default values, or find that some or all of the Akeeba Ticket System email templates are missing we have included a utility page in Akeeba Ticket System itself. Go to Components, Akeeba Ticket System, Control Panel and click on the Email Templates button.

Email Templates

The Mail Templates button takes you to Joomla's Mail Templates page and pre–filters it to show only Akeeba Ticket System email templates.

The Install or Update button will only install email templates which are missing. If there are any unmodified email templates which have changed since the previous version of ATS that installed them they will be updated too. If you have modified any email template it will NOT be updated.

The Reset button is the nuclear option. It will first remove all Mail Templates assigned to Akeeba Ticket System. It will then install them afresh. Use this if you think you have messed up so badly you don't know what else to do or you believe the database data for the mail templates is messed up beyond any reasonable attempt at recovery. Any customisations you have made will be lost.

Allowed variables in e-mails

Email templates wouldn't be worth anything if you couldn't include useful information about the ticket, the post and the user in them. You can do so by using "variables". The variables are ALWAYS written in all-uppercase letters, surrounded by curly brackets, without spaces, exactly as defined below.

Not all variables are supported by all email templates. When editing an email template you can see which variables are supported under the Insert Tags sidebar.

[Tip]Tip

If you do not see a variable in the Insert Tags sidebar the missing variables will not take effect in your email templates. In this case, you will have to use the Install or Update button in the Components, Akeeba Ticket System, Email Templates page.

However, this might not be enough. This will not update any email templates you have already customised. If you want to update the default (English – Great Britain) email templates after modifying them you will have to use the Reset button on that page, but you will lose all customisation.

We understand the way reset works is unfortunate, but that's how Joomla's Mail Templates feature works. We did not write this feature. If we had written this feature we'd have definitely provided a way to update the list of supported mail variables without overwriting the content of said templates, as well as a way to import and export the contents of email templates. If you feel the way Mail Templates works is unsuited to real world use please feel free to submit an issue or discussion on Joomla's GitHub repository so that the core maintainers see it and do something about it. Unfortunately, we have zero control over core Joomla! code.

The available variables are:

{SITENAME}

The name of your site, as configured in Joomla's Global Configuration page.

{SITEURL}

The URL to your site, as detected the last time you visited the Akeeba Ticket System Control Panel page.

{NAME}

The full name of the person being contacted. For the mail templates which have to do with the mail gateway (receiving emails) this may be the name of the sender as communicated in the email received if a Joomla user cannot be found by the email address they sent an email from.

{URL}

The URL of the ticket on your site

{USER_NAME}

The name of the email recipient.

{USER_EMAIL}

The email address of the email recipient.

{USER_USERNAME}

The username of the email recipient.

{OWNER_GROUPS}

A comma separated listed of the Joomla! User Groups the ticket owner belongs to, e.g. Registered, Clients, FooBar Widget Clients. This variable is only available for emails sent to managers.

{ID}

The numeric ticket ID

{TITLE}

The ticket's title

{POSTER_NAME}

The full name of the person who posted the ticket / reply

{POSTER_USERNAME}

The username of the person who posted the ticket / reply

{CATNAME}

The title of the category the ticket belongs in

{TEXT}

The post text

{ATTACHMENT}

A link to the attachment(s) — including the filename and the URL. This does not output anything if there is no attachment