Requires: Charitable Pro 1.8.18+
If you just want the short version, read Getting started with the email manager. This page covers the whole screen, including the parts you will only need occasionally.
How the screen is arranged
Settings > Emails holds every email Charitable and your add-ons can send. The individual emails sit in a list grouped by who receives them, with the editor beside the list, and the settings that apply to every email have sub-tabs of their own.
Your data carried over exactly. Subjects, content, and each email’s enabled or disabled state are unchanged. There is no migration step and nothing to re-save.
The four sub-tabs
| Sub-tab | Scope |
|---|---|
| Emails | The individual emails, grouped by audience, with the editor beside them. |
| General | Settings shared by every email, such as the from name and address. |
| Customization | The shared look: logo, colors, footer. |
| Status | Email Health and Recently Sent. The label carries a badge when health is not OK. |
The groups
Emails are grouped by who receives them, in this order:
| Group | Contents |
|---|---|
| Donor Emails | Everything that reaches the person who gave, such as receipts and thank-yous. |
| Admin Notifications | What your team is told when something happens. |
| Tributes | Added by the Tributes add-on. |
| Rewards | Added by the Rewards add-on. |
| Team & Creators | Added by the Team & Creators add-on. |
| System | Password resets and other WordPress-level mail. |
| More | Anything that does not declare a group of its own. |
Groups for add-ons you do not have do not appear.
Adding your own group
Developers can register a group with the charitable_email_categories filter. Each entry takes a label and an order, and the built-in groups use 10 (Donor), 20 (Admin), 25 (Tributes), 28 (Rewards), 30 (Team & Creators), 40 (System) and 99 (More), so pick an order that puts yours where you want it.
add_filter( 'charitable_email_categories', function ( $categories ) {
$categories['my_group'] = array(
'label' => __( 'My Emails', 'my-plugin' ),
'order' => 35,
);
return $categories;
} );The editor
Selecting an email from the list opens it on the right. You get:
The full WordPress editor, including Add Media, so images do not require hand-written HTML.
A live preview, updating as you type.
Desktop and Mobile preview buttons. Mobile scales the email to phone width, and it is the one worth checking before you save: most donors read on a phone, and a layout that reads well on a desktop does not always survive the trip.
The ⋮ actions menu on an email holds four more:
Send test mails the email to your own address.
Preview opens the email full size.
Copy from… pulls another email’s content into the one you are editing. This is the fastest way to build a matching pair, such as a receipt and its admin counterpart, without copying between browser tabs.
Reset to default restores the content Charitable ships with, which is useful when an edit has gone wrong and you would rather start again than reconstruct the original.
Merge tags and test sends
Merge tags behave as they always have in real emails.
In a test email, a tag with no value renders a labelled placeholder, such as [donor first name not set], rather than an empty gap. An empty gap reads as broken template text. Real emails are unaffected: a donor never sees a placeholder.
The test email’s Data dropdown is labelled Latest donation, which is exactly what it uses, your most recent real donation. It does not invent figures.
Email Health
On the Status sub-tab, Email Health reports problems worth your attention. The most useful case is sends that failed: a bounced or rejected email is otherwise invisible until someone tells you they never got their receipt.
Alerts are dismissible. Once you have dealt with the underlying problem, dismiss it and it stays dismissed rather than nagging. While health is not OK, the Status sub-tab shows a badge, so you see it without going looking.
Recently Sent
Also on the Status sub-tab: a record of what actually went out and, new in 1.8.18, who it went to. When a donor says they did not receive their receipt, this answers whether it was sent, when, and to which address, which is usually enough to tell a delivery problem from a wrong address.
The single-table view
The previous Emails screen is still available. Add ?view=classic to the Emails settings URL, and ?view=manager to come back. Charitable stores the choice against your user account, so you set it once rather than on every visit.
Both views read and write the same settings, so switching between them cannot lose anything.
Related
- Getting started with the email manager
- AI assistants in Charitable, the other headline feature of 1.8.18.
