Customizing the Email “From” Address

All email notifications are sent from a single email address in LiveWhale. In some cases like RSVP confirmations, the “Reply-To” address and “From Name” is set to that of the event organizer, so registrants can reply to their confirmation email and you’ll receive it.

To configure the global “From” address, open the master LiveWhale config (/livewhale/core/config.php) for editing and change the following lines:

$GLOBALS['LIVEWHALE_CONFIG']['FROM_ADDRESS']='noreply@myschool.edu';
$GLOBALS['LIVEWHALE_CONFIG']['FROM_NAME']='LiveWhale CMS';

Some email servers may flag emails with “@myschool.edu” in the “From Name” as suspicious, so in LiveWhale 1.7.1+, you can elect to always use the FROM_NAME instead of having it overwritten by the event or form organizer.

$GLOBALS['LIVEWHALE_CONFIG']['FROM_ADDRESS']='noreply@myschool.edu';
$GLOBALS['LIVEWHALE_CONFIG']['FROM_NAME']='LiveWhale CMS';
$GLOBALS['LIVEWHALE_CONFIG']['ALWAYS_USE_FROM_NAME']=true; // don't override FROM_NAME with event organizer email

Sending Email via SMTP

To have LiveWhale send notification emails using a remote SMTP server, follow these steps:

1. Open the master LiveWhale config (/livewhale/core/config.php) for editing
2. Locate the HOSTS array, $GLOBALS['LIVEWHALE_CONFIG']['HOSTS']
3. Specify the SMTP connectivity for each of your hosts (See table below for setting descriptions) This example assumes you are using Gmail via Google Apps:

'SMTP_HOST'=>'smtp.google.com',
'SMTP_PORT'=>587,
'SMTP_USER'=>'do-not-reply@yourdomain.edu',
​'SMTP_PASS'=>'your-password',

Note: For a normal (non-Google Apps) Gmail account, use the host smtp.gmail.com. Also note, you’ll need to login and tell Gmail to allow access from “less-secure apps” in order for LiveWhale to be able to access their SMTP service.

Customizing Notification Emails

You can customize all notification emails, inside and out.

Default template files you can copy and modify are located in /public_html/livewhale/notifications/.

To customize any of those templates, make a copy of that file and upload it to /_ingredients/notifications/. Then you can make any changes you like to that version.

(If you customized your notification template in an earlier version of LiveWhale, those files might be in /livewhale/client/modules/messages/includes/ – you can move those HTML files into /_ingredients/notifications/ so everything is in one place.)

Master Templates

The master templates email_subject.html and email_template.html are the starting place for every email. Inside these master templates, the subject and body variables are generated using the appropriate template (e.g., rsvp_confirmation_subject.html and rsvp_confirmation_body.html). They support the following variables:

• client (the contents of $_LW->CONFIG['CLIENT_NAME'])
• subject (the contents of [notification_type]_subject.html)
• body (the contents of [notification_type]_subject.html)
• first_name
• last_name
• email
• date
• time
• type (the module sending the notification)
• header (the contents of $_LW->CONFIG['EMAIL_HEADER'], for backwards-compatibility)
• footer (the contents of $_LW->CONFIG['EMAIL_FOOTER'], for backwards-compatibility)

Advanced: to edit/process any existing email variables, or to add your own variables to use in templates, use a custom module with the onFormatMessageVars handler.

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