Creating custom placeholders

On this page:

• Creating a placeholder
• Creating a personalized replacer

By default, Mailcoach offers a couple of placeholders you can use in the subject or content of your automation mail, such as webviewUrl and unsubscribeUrl.

Creating a placeholder#

Custom placeholders can be created. Do this you must create a class and let it implement Spatie\Mailcoach\Domain\Automation\Support\Replacers\AutomationMailReplacer interface.

This interface contains two methods. In replace you must do the actual replacement. In helpText you must return the helptext that will be visible on the automation mail content screen.

Here is the code of the WebviewAutomationMailReplacer that ships with Mailcoach.

namespace Spatie\Mailcoach\Domain\Automation\Support\Replacers;

use Spatie\Mailcoach\Domain\Automation\Models\AutomationMail;

class WebviewAutomationMailReplacer implements AutomationMailReplacer
{
    public function helpText(): array
    {
        return [
            'webviewUrl' => __mc('This URL will display the HTML of the automation mail'),
        ];
    }

    public function replace(string $text, AutomationMail $automationMail): string
    {
        $webviewUrl = $automationMail->webviewUrl();

        return str_ireplace('::webviewUrl::', $webviewUrl, $text);
    }
}

After creating a replacer you must register it in the automations.replacers config key of the mailcoach config file.

Creating a personalized replacer#

A regular replacer will do its job when the automation mail is being prepared. This will only happen once when sending an automation mail. There’s also a second kind of replacer: Spatie\Mailcoach\Domain\Automation\Support\Replacers\PersonalizedReplacer. These replacers will get executed for each mail that is being sent out in an automation mail.
PersonalizedReplacers have access to subscriber they are sent to via the Send object given in the replace method.

Here is the code of the UnsubscribeUrlReplacer that ships with Mailcoach.

namespace Spatie\Mailcoach\Domain\Automation\Support\Replacers;

use Spatie\Mailcoach\Domain\Shared\Models\Send;

class UnsubscribeUrlReplacer implements PersonalizedReplacer
{
    public function helpText(): array
    {
        return [
            'unsubscribeUrl' => __mc('The URL where users can unsubscribe'),
            'unsubscribeTag::your tag' => __mc('The URL where users can be removed from a specific tag'),
        ];
    }

    public function replace(string $text, Send $pendingSend): string
    {
        $unsubscribeUrl = $pendingSend->subscriber->unsubscribeUrl($pendingSend);

        $text = str_ireplace('::unsubscribeUrl::', $unsubscribeUrl, $text);

        preg_match_all('/::unsubscribeTag::(.*)::/', $text, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

        foreach ($matches as $match) {
            [$key, $tag] = $match;

            $unsubscribeTagUrl = $pendingSend->subscriber->unsubscribeTagUrl($tag);

            $text = str_ireplace($key, $unsubscribeTagUrl, $text);
        }

        return $text;
    }
}