Email template publishing infrastructure

[leigh-johnson]

Emails are by far the most effective form of outreach/marketing, but right now the process for publishing PrintNanny emails is manual.

Current Process

Step 1: Build Maizzle email template

Run npm install && npm build` in printnanny-maizzle (this repo)

This outputs an email .html to build_production/ with in-lined CSS/table styles.

Step 2: Upload HTML file to Mailgun templates

I currently do this via Mailgun's UI.

Step 3: Upload images to cdn.printnanny.ai

cdn.printnanny.ai is backed by a GCP Storage bucket, so this is done via gsutil cp

Step 4: Send a test email

I currently use curl for testing

$curl -s --user '<token>' \
         https://api.mailgun.net/v3/mail.printnanny.ai/messages \
         -F from='PrintNanny <[email protected]>' \
         -F to='Leigh Johnson <[email protected]>' \
         -F h:Reply-To='[email protected]' \
         -F subject="[PrintNanny] You're invited to the Founding Member program" \
         -F template='founding-member-november-v2' \
         -F h:X-Mailgun-Variables='{"name": "Leigh"}'

Step 5: add email_campaign row to production

I currently use Django's fixtures to check the row into source control, which can then be loaded into the production database via python3 manage.py loaddata <json file>
https://github.com/bitsy-ai/printnanny-webapp/blob/main/print_nanny_webapp/email_campaigns/fixtures/email_campaigns.json

Ideal Process

When new revisions are merged to printnanny-maizzle, do the following:

1. Build email template html
2. Update or create template via Mailgun's API: https://documentation.mailgun.com/en/latest/api-templates.html
3. Send a test email (include version info in the footer if possible)
4. PROMOTE BUILD step: POST printnanny.ai/api/email-campaigns/update-or-create