Email bodies

Render HTML and plain-text email from the same templates as your site.

An email needs an HTML body and a plain-text one. Render both from templates, with PageTemplate for HTML and PageTextTemplate for text. A text template uses the same ${...} expressions but doesn’t escape HTML or parse tags.

from chameleon_rs import PageTemplate, PageTextTemplate

html_body = PageTemplate("""\
<p>Hi ${user},</p>
<p>Your order <strong>#${order.id}</strong> has shipped:</p>
<ul><li tal:repeat="item order.items">${item}</li></ul>
""")

text_body = PageTextTemplate("""\
Hi ${user},

Your order #${order.id} has shipped:
${'\\n'.join('- ' + item for item in order.items)}
""")


class Order:
    id = 1042
    items = ['Rust & Python mug', 'Sticker <3']


print(html_body(user='Ada', order=Order()))
print(text_body(user='Ada', order=Order()))

<p>Hi Ada,</p>
<p>Your order <strong>#1042</strong> has shipped:</p>
<ul><li>Rust &amp; Python mug</li>
<li>Sticker &lt;3</li></ul>

Hi Ada,

Your order #1042 has shipped:
- Rust & Python mug
- Sticker <3

The HTML body escapes & and <, and the text body leaves them alone.

In an app, keep the email templates in your template folder (for example emails/), and load them with PageTemplateLoader, or PageTextTemplateFile for the text version. Emails can use partials too. render_partial works in any template, so the footer you share with the site can live in one file:

<p>Hi ${user},</p>
...
${render_partial('emails/_footer.pt', unsubscribe_url=unsubscribe_url)}

Then pass the two strings to your mail library, such as email.message.EmailMessage’s set_content() and add_alternative(..., subtype='html').