Symphony.

I'm working on a project that will generate a lot of email feedback to a variety of people in an organization for myriad reasons. I'd like to do more than use the symphony/template/notifcation.tpl specifically customized HTML emails.

I'm running Symphony 2.2.5 and Members 1.1.1 extension.

That being said, the two extensions, both by long-time Symphonians, that I see discussed in the forum are:

1. Email Template Manager
2. Email Template Filter

I would love it if a Symphony forum members would chime in on any or all of the following:

• What are the differences between the two extensions?
• What circumstances favor one or the other extension and why?
• What are the Pros and Cons of the two extensions?

As always, thank you for your time and interaction. They are valuable to me and to everyone who uses the forum.

Based from this comment, but updated to reflect the current truths.

ETF provides a UI to create your filter and therefore requires no knowledge of PHP. It will send HTML emails to the recipients and has a logging functionality so you can see what emails were sent and when. The tutorial (sending different emails to different addresses depending on a particular option set on the form) is our most common use case at work. Creating your email is done using normal Symphony pages/datasources (and events if you want to). ETF recently supports sending of attachments, by looking for <link rel='attachment' href='your/attachment.pdf' /> in your HTML.

ETM is powerful in that you can customise everything, that is, plaintext copy, HTML copy, add attachments and so forth. It also offers filters so that you don't have to know your way around PHP (so essentially provides the same basic functionality as ETF). Creating your email template is done via the backend of Symphony, so is a little different to the usual workflow, but has some nice functionality in that you can ?debug pages in the backend.

The extensions almost come down to personal preference these days. ETF uses standard Symphony workflow, ETM is slightly different but gives you more power and flexibility if you need it. ETM probably has the upper hand in that's it's more actively developed, but both have been stable in my experience. The one con of ETM (and I could be wrong), is that it lacks logging functionality so you can see what emails were sent.

Glad to see the ETF and ETM are still in use!

As brendo said, there is little or no difference if you only look at features. Both support sending HTML and PLAIN emails, both using either an API or event filters.

In my eyes, the biggest upside of the ETM is that you will be able to use it with the new Email Newsletters extension, which will only support the ETM for its templates. So if you ever plan on sending mass-email, the ETM is the way to go.

I am running into issues with ETF and sending the Member's extension recovery code. Looks like ETM is better for the Member's extension as well.

Yes. ETM was specifically designed to work with the Members extension.

Actually, I didn't realize the Member's recovery code is the password field. So both ETM and ETF can cope. I do prefer the ETM integration though.

Thank you @Brendo, @creativedutchmen, @Lewis and @bauhouse. Your feedback is golden, exactly what we needed to know. Much appreciation.