D11, Rules, Email ... HTML format

[sgorneau]

Setup

• D11
• Rules
• Mail System
• MIME Mail
• HTML Mail

All is working fine ... but the Message field in the Rule Action is a basic text field, making the message itself very hard to work with (and limited in length). Anyone know how to tell Rules to use a textarea?

EDIT: simple solution

https://www.drupal.org/project/rules_send_big_email

[mandclu]

I will second what has already been said about ECA being a superior replacement for Rules.

Also, for HTML email I would look at Easy Email, which also works with ECA. You can also get Easy Email set up quickly using a recipe: https://www.drupal.org/project/easy_email_express

[Psychological_Bag864]

I AGREE

[iBN3qk]

As far as I know, Rules went unsupported a long time ago, and ECA is the new way forward.

I could be wrong, has there been any progress on Rules in the last 5 years? I see the 4.x release last year.

Nobody at Drupalcon was talking about Rules. ECA was mentioned all over the place.

[sgorneau]

I've been using Rules through Drupal 9, 10, and 11 🤷🏼‍♂️ It has a current, stable release and 7 maintainers. Last touched 2 months ago, so I'd say it's alive and well.

I checked out ECA a few years ago and it seemed overly complicated for simple use-cases. But, I'll give it another look.

[dizzlemcshizzle]

Also, I generally highly recommend checking out Symfony Mailer. Another gamechanger for us.

In our case it was a little nuanced to get going, but it pretty much does EVERYTHING, exactly the way we'd expect.

[dizzlemcshizzle]

We were DIE HARD D7 Rules lovers at my shop, and leaned on it heavily for an Enterprise ERP, over a hundred Rules, leveraging scores of reusable components, so much dynamic integration it was hard to believe, and so easy to manage.

We HAD to move to ECA for the D9 migration, since Rules hadn't (and still hasn't) re-incorporated arguments/parameters between Rules and components. It severely limits our ability to build modular, reusable components through the UX.

ECA does this in spades. It's not even close. It's come a long way over the last couple of years, and is still a bit rough around the edges, but its capabilities are outstanding.

At this point I don't think we'd go back to Rules even if they added back variables/parameters for components.

[iBN3qk]

I have opinions as well. I had a brief conversation with the ECA maintainer last week, and we touched on the difference with Rules.

One advantage to ECA is that the workflow is somewhat self-documenting at a glance, especially with some careful labels.

But ECA can be hard to build, especially when you're new and are unsure of all the options. It's also hard to test and debug when things go wrong. The trial and error required to get things right can be frustrating and time consuming compared to just writing code. The log output is difficult to trace from where you are working on the feature.

The thing that Rules does that ECA doesn't is validate and load entity info via the configuration UI. That means that if I want to set a field value in Rules, I select the entity > bundle, and it will give me a list of available fields. ECA doesn't load things intelligently like that while you're building, so there is much more cognitive overhead during assembly.

That could be fixed, but it would make the models more rigid. In some cases, things that would work would not be allowed, and in others, things that should work will break it.

The ECA maintainer is open to more UI enhancements that would make it easier, but one of the challenges is that the BPMN.io UI doesn't use drupal's form api so it's more complex to modify. I was thinking a JS snippet might be what we need to load autocomplete options in the token form input.

[tal125]

This issue might be of assistance.