If you have configured your membership management to use email (for sign-up and password-reset), CommunityServer will interface with your user community using electronic mail. This includes a number of messages which you’ve probably ignored or not thought about updating.

All of these email messages are stored within an emails.XML file located at siteroot/languages/en-US/emails/

I’m not going to reference all of them here (there’s some 38 different messages) but some of these should really be customized for your community.

The most important message to adapt is New Account creation. A chance to welcome your new CommunityServer member!

This is a golden opportunity to give a personal welcome to your new member and to signpost various getting started resources and the places you think a new member might get value from. We even get “Thank-you” notes back from New Members for our welcome – OK, we sign the member email with site moderator names, so at least we present a human rather than automated system response.

Some of our CommunityServer clients also provide direct dial help desk telephone numbers and support emails as additional member resource.

A far better welcome! Provide new members with good sign-posts for your CommunityServer content. How else will they discover your different sections?

The following section explains how to go about customizing your member email messages.

Microsoft XML Notepad 2007 or Visual Studio

If you haven’t already got Visual Studio, download the Microsoft XML Notepad 2007 utility. Create a backup of your existing file located at siteroot/languages/en-US/emails/emails.xml.

Open emails.xml and use search (Ctrl-F) to locate the email description that you want to amend. The New Member Sign-up email we reference above is “NewUserAccountCreateGeneratedPassword”.

Every message is provided in a text version and as HTML. Edit both of these messages to include your customized content. Of course, the HTML content can contain URL references, font-styling, etc. to make your message more welcoming.

XML Notepad is not the most intuitive of editors. You have to expand the #text or HTML sections and double click on elements of text before you can edit these. XML Notepad does not provide any HTML editing tools, so prepare your HTML text and URL <a> tags in Visual Studio or your preferred HTML editor.

Test your changes! You need to check that your messages STILL generate for each of the messages that you have amended. If you’ve corrupted the emails.xml XML structure, your email message will not be created.

Nick Harrington
team Ambay Software