Customizing the ‘New Order Confirmation Email‘ template in Magento may be a havoc for the first time if you do not know the write way. But it is as easy as anything. Recently I needed to customize the item information in the ‘New Order Confirmation Email’. I googled a number of links but found nothing useful. Then I decided to find my own way, and after 2 hours of hard work I found a simple way. Here are the steps to customize the email template:

1. In the Magento Admin panel go to ‘System > Transactional Emails’ and click on ‘Add New Template’.
2. In the ‘Load default template’ container select ‘New Order’ in the ‘Template’ dropdown. Alse select our desired ‘Locale’.
3. Click on ‘Load Template’. It will load the Default email template to edit for you. Now you can edit the ‘Template Subject’ and ‘Template Content’ to suit your needs. See the following screenshot:

Magento has a Newsletter Module that allows the storeowner/admin to send messages to the newsletter subscribers.
The customers/vistors can subscribe to the newsletter by filling the subscription form with their email id. However a small feature is missing in this module, Whenever a customer or visitor is subscribed to the newsletter the admin doesn’t get any notification/alert about the subscription. We can add this feature through our custom module. Our custom module will hook through the newsletter save event and triggers a function in our model class that will send the notification email to admin.

Step 1: Create an email template in html and save it app/locale/en_US/template/email directory. Our email template looks as shown

Here is a little snippet of code that can come in handy if you are like me handling a task of programatically creating an order in Magento. My issue was that I had to disable emails beeing sent out to the customers, while at the same time leave the normal frontend process. Thus I could not just go under Magento admin System > Congifuration and disable email sending from there.

Here is the sample line code you just need to place above final $order->save() or possibly $checkout->saveOrder():

Magento has quite interesting email sending capabilities. However, those are more in terms of email templates then selecting a non-built in email server. Sometimes, your web hosting might have separate mail server and even the simple php send mail does not work. In such cases you are forced to use an external mail server that supports SMTP. Good example of this is a Gmail.

Recently I have been working on a custom checkout page for one of our clients in Sweden. I had some trouble figuring out how to send default Magento order email with all of the order info. After an hour or so of studying Magento core code, here is the solution on how to send email after successful order has been made.