Branding your receipts is getting easier
With last week's upgrades to CiviCRM, I noticed a pretty strong trend:
Most organizations are modifying CiviCRM’s message templates simply to include their logo at the top of receipts and other auto-generated emails.
Up to now, this modification has made upgrades a little more troublesome than they need to be.
Here's why:
When a CiviCRM upgrade makes changes to the original content of that message template, the upgrade is smart enough not to wipe out your own customizations.
But it's not smart enough to apply those changes into your customized message template content. (That would actually be pretty hard for any software to do well.)
So instead you have two choices, neither of them very satisfactory:
For every message template you've customized, manually review the differences between your modified template content and the new template content. Then try to merge your customizations with whatever changes to CiviCRM is calling for, into a hybrid of the latest content customized for your branding. This can be very tedious and painful.
Ignore the latest changes from CiviCRM, and just leave your customized message template in its older form. This might be fine, but it might actually break those message templates so they don't work properly at all. So, not great.
Starting in version 5.76, CiviCRM will make this whole process easier, by letting you define a sitewide setting for your logo or other branding. You can change that one setting whenever you want, and it will be reflected in all your message templates.
That means you probably won't need to customize your message templates at all.
Which of course makes the entire upgrade process easier, and saves you all the pain of updating message templates every time you upgrade.
All the best,
A.