Error when trying to send HTML email on event onActivateUser

Question

Background:

I'm working on a site that has frontend registration with some custom fields. The client would like to have a notification email whenever someone activates their account, containing the info on that user (so name, email and the custom fields).

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Issue at hand:

For some reason, I'm getting the following error when I try to send an HTML email on the 'onActivateUser':

Unable to find the template “_emails/customer-service-notification”.

If however I try to send a plain text email, it all goes without problem.

I'd prefer to send out an HTML email so I'd like to resolve this.

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What I already tried:

• Triggering the service function in another way (via custom controller action) sends the html email just fine
• Sending the mail by just setting the content as string in the function works just fine

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Code:

Main plugin file - init function

craft()->on('users.onActivateUser', function (Event $event){
    $user = $event->params['user'];
    craft()->plugin_customerServiceNotification->sendNotificationMail($user);
});

customerServiceNotification

public function sendNotificationMail(UserModel $user){
    $mailer = craft()->email;
    $mailToBeSent = new EmailModel();

    $mailToBeSent->subject = Craft::t('Nieuwe gebruiker geregistreerd');
    $mailToBeSent->fromName = 'xyz';
    $mailToBeSent->sender = '[email protected]';

    $mailToBeSent->toEmail = '[email protected]';

    $content = craft()->templates->render(
        '_emails/customer-service-notification',
        [
            'userInfo' => [
                'email' => $user->email,
                'name' => $user->fullName,
            ],
        ]
    );
    $mailToBeSent->htmlBody = $content;

    $mailer->sendEmail($mailToBeSent);
}

Folder structure:

Answer 1

Changing sendNotificationEmail() to this should fix it for you:

public function sendNotificationMail(UserModel $user) {
    $mailer = craft()->email;
    $mailToBeSent = new EmailModel();

    $mailToBeSent->subject = Craft::t('Nieuwe gebruiker geregistreerd');
    $mailToBeSent->fromName = 'xyz';
    $mailToBeSent->sender = '[email protected]';

    $mailToBeSent->toEmail = '[email protected]';

    $originalTemplateMode = craft()->templates->getTemplateMode();
    craft()->template->setTemplateMode(TemplateMode::Site);

    $content = craft()->templates->render(
        '_emails/customer-service-notification',
        [
            'userInfo' => [
                'email' => $user->email,
                'name' => $user->fullName,
            ],
        ]
    );

    $mailToBeSent->htmlBody = $content;
    $mailer->sendEmail($mailToBeSent);

    craft()->templates->setTemplateMode($originalTemplateMode);
}