Tracking Freeform Notifications in Git

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Where I work, our ExpressionEngine deployment process is usually one step: git push origin master. I love that it's so easy.

When it isn't that easy, when there are extra steps, it's too easy to forget the extra steps (and I get annoyed). Sometimes these extra steps are unavoidable: a channel field needs to be added, a module needs to be installed, etc.

Recently I ran across an annoying extra step that could be automated; I just had to think through it: updating Freeform notification templates.

Freeform does not allow saving its notification templates to the disk. That means that they can't be tracked in git. There doesn't seem to be any way around this. Which, for us, previously meant copy/pasting an updated notification template from a dev or staging environment to the production environment. Annoying. Easy to forget.

However, we already track normal ExpressionEngine templates in git. If we could store notification templates as ExpressionEngine templates, we could track them in git and avoid an unnecessary deployment step.

That line of thinking led to this plan:

  1. Create an ExpressionEngine template using {exp:freeform:entries}.
  2. Call that ExpressionEngine template from the Freeform notification template.

Step 1: Create an ExpressionEngine template

In a Freeform notification template, all of the variables are in the easy-to-use {first_name} format. In an ExpressionEngine template, they are not.

To get that data, we need to use the {exp:freeform:entries} tag with the right parameters.

{exp:freeform:entries
    dynamic="no"
    form_name="some-form"
    status="open|closed|pending"
    entry_id="{embed:entry_id}"}

{/exp:freeform:entries}

(Note that, in my testing, the form_name parameter was required for this to work.)

To get the data in this loop, we can use {freeform:field:first_name} instead of {first_name}. (A list of all of the variables and tag pairs is available in the Freeform documentation.)

With this structure in place, we can create a (very crude) notification template like this:

{exp:freeform:entries
    dynamic="no"
    form_name="some-form"
    status="open|closed|pending"
    entry_id="{embed:entry_id}"}
  <h1>Somebody submitted a form...</h1>
  <dl>
    <dt>Name</dt>
    <dd>{freeform:field:name}</dd>
    <dt>Email</dt>
    <dd>{freeform:field:email}</dd>

    {freeform:all_form_fields}
      <dt>{freeform:field_label}</dt>
      <dd>{freeform:field_output}</dd>
    {/freeform:all_form_fields}
  </dl>
{/exp:freeform:entries}

Step 2: Put an embed in the notification template

Because Freeform notifications can't be tracked, we want to put as little in the Freeform notification template as possible. And never have to change it again.

The minimal stub that worked best for us is just an embed with an entry_id parameter.

{embed="freeform-notifications/.some-notification"
    entry_id="{freeform_entry_id}"}

That's it. Changes to notification templates happen in the ExpressionEngine template, are tracked in git, and get deployed.

That's one less thing for me to forget during deployment.