Moodle plugins directory: Quickmail

Excellent plugin and very useful. Congratulations!

Could you please add the following lines:
- blocks/quickmail/config_qm_form.php (line 38)
'Fullname' => get_string('fullname')
- blocks/quickmail/settings.php (line 49)
'Fullname' => get_string('fullname')

From already thank you very much.
Best regards.
Verónica.

Hi,
we are using Moodle 3.1.7 with Essential theme and notice with the latest 2017 plugin instance the Potential Recipients box is a set height and rather large. It is much bigger than the box for Recipients. It is the similar problem in Clean theme but worse in Essential. This is a change from the previous version where boxes were aligned and tidy. Looks very out of proportion in this latest version.

What is the roadmap looking like for this plugin? It would be great if it were possible to include variables/parameters such as the course grade for instance. Thanks for any info! Cheers, Ben

Hi Ben, in regards to a road map we don't really have one at this point. Our current objectives are simply to bring the package up to date with some of Moodle's core additions since original development such as leveraging the messaging API and utilizing renderers. Internally, I decided to shift around the code a bit so that a "course" email and an "admin" email run through the same methods but this won't make much of a difference for the end user - hopefully performance will increase a little. I'm also planning on adding more Javascript and async behavior to the UI for a more modern feel.

There will be no breaking changes in this new 2.0 version which I felt was important since the package is so widely used. But I do feel that this will be a great starting pointing for adding some new features like what you're describing. To me, Quickmail's core function is to provide an interface that allows a user to easily construct a message that is scoped to a course - a "recipient repository layer" on top of sending a message. So I think your idea here about course-specific variables/parameters could very well fall within the scope of this package.

What did you have in mind? Would these variables be injected into the message contents? Would they be used to filter recipients? I'd love to chat about any ideas you have.

Cheers,

Chad

Does the most recent version of the plugin fix the issue where the textbox area does not auto-resize?

Robin, just to clarify, are you referring to the message body input textarea not being responsive for smaller screens, forcing a horizontal scroll?

Hi Chad, Yes. That's correct. The message body input textarea is not responsive.

Hi Chad, are you able to reproduce?

Hi Robin, yes I'm able to reproduce. The entire layout of that page is not currently responsive across different widths. I'm going to leverage "renderers" in this next version which will bring that responsive behavior and should work better with themes. What version and theme are you currently using?

Sounds great, Chad.
Our institution is currently on 3.1 and we're using a custom responsive theme based on evolve-D.

When will it be upgraded for Moodle 3.2 and later?

Hi, Just to confirm the issue I reported earlier about the Potential Recipients box is a set height and rather large. It is much bigger than the box for Recipients only happens in the Edge browser when using Windows 10. Seems fine in Chrome with Windows 10 and fine in IE and Chrome on Win7 so not so bad as first thought.

Hello Stabsstelle, I'm going to put through a small patch today that will address Moodle 3.3 compatibility. I installed Quickmail on a fresh install of 3.3 today and I did see an error in regards to a deprecated "pix_url()" function. I've got that taken care of. Will do a little further testing to make sure I've got it handled. Wanted to ask if you are aware of anything else that stands in the way of Quickmail being compatible with 3.3?

Hey Yvonne, thanks for this great feedback! I have to admit that I rarely (well, never) test in Edge. I'll be sure to do so today and take a look at that sizing issue in hopes of including any styling fixes on today's small patch.

Chad

Hello, Chad,
We use Moodle 3.3.1 (Build: 20170710). We have put at ./moodle/admin/settings.php?section=outgoingmailconfig "allowedemaildomains", Quickmail does not take these data and so outgoing e-mails are sent with the common noreplyaddress instead of the personal sender's adress. Would be fine if you can do it ...
Greetings from Salzburg, Austria
Robert

Yvonne, first, I didn't mean any offense in my comments about Edge! I'm just on a Mac now and have never had the opportunity of using it. With that said, I just got it set up on my machine and it looks quite nice, in fact way faster than my favorite, Chrome! But anyway... I found that on 3.3, a Quickmail install straight of the box (Dev-30 branch, what is available through this Moodle site) looked nearly identical to what I see on Chrome. I also checked it out on our production site which runs 3.1 and the essential theme and get very similar results. I've got screenshots I can share but, for the sake of discussion, I can say that it's (potential) about ~1.5" larger on the screen (than selected). Is this what you're experiencing? I will fix this but I want to make sure I'm not missing something here.

Hey Robert, and greetings to you from Louisiana. I see your problem there. That "allowedemaildomains" config option was added in to Moodle core since 3.1 which is why it wasn't handled by our development thus far. With that said, I don't believe this is something we would allow here at LSU for security reasons (potential spoofing, etc) but I could be wrong. I will discuss further with our team and find out what we can do. But out of curiosity, if you set up the configuration in Moodle to allow whitelist subdomains, and to NOT use the default noreply, wouldn't the email go out as you want it - with whatever that user's email address is? If not, what kind of errors are you receiving?

By the way, I committed that one small change (3.3 compatibility) yesterday to our dev-30 branch on github. I will go ahead and run through it the Moodle plugins system today as well.

Chad