16-Mar-2026 — Customisable email templates, placeholder toolbar, and email routing diagnostics

build 540 — commit cc7411f

Covers: follow-up notifications, mailing lists, and member priority (#177), improve transactional email deliverability across all environments#186)

Add admin-editable markdown email templates with section toggle, edit/preview mode, insertable placeholder fields via toolbar dropdown and per-event overrides for all five email types.
Introduce BookingEmailType enum replacing string literals across frontend and backend.
Add data migration to backfill default templates and help content.
Show SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication results with colour-coded badges and plain-English summaries in the email routing log.
Fix worker invocation log timing and row striping.

User Guide — Booking Email Templates & Reminder Notifications

Admins can now customise the content of every booking-related email and schedule automatic reminder emails to be sent before events.
All configuration is managed from the Bookings → Configuration tab in the admin area.

Email Types

Five email types are supported, each sent automatically at the appropriate point in the booking lifecycle:

Email	Triggered when
Confirmation	A booking is created
Cancellation	A booking is cancelled by the attendee or an admin
Waitlisted	A non-member booking is displaced during member priority
Restored	A waitlisted booking is restored after a cancellation
Reminder	The event is within the configured reminder window

Customising Email Templates

Global Templates

Navigate to Bookings → Configuration → Email Templates. Each email type has a markdown editor where you can write the email body. A live preview is shown alongside the editor.

Per-Event Overrides

For confirmation and reminder emails, you can override the global template on a per-event basis. Navigate to Bookings → Per-Event Detail, select an event, and edit the override fields.
If an override is set, it takes priority over the global template for that event.

Template Resolution Order

When sending an email the system resolves the template as follows:

Per-event override (confirmation and reminder only)
Global template from booking configuration
Built-in default (hardcoded fallback) The first non-empty value wins.

Placeholders

Templates support the following placeholders, which are replaced with real values at send time:

Placeholder	Replaced with
`{{EVENT_TITLE}}`	The event title
`{{EVENT_DATE}}`	Formatted date and time (e.g. Wednesday, 15 March…)
`{{EVENT_LINK}}`	URL to the event page
`{{ATTENDEE_NAME}}`	First name of the primary attendee
`{{ATTENDEE_LIST}}`	Markdown list of all attendees with email addresses
`{{PLACES_COUNT}}`	Number of places in the booking
Include them in your template text exactly as shown (with double
braces). Unknown placeholders are left as-is.

Reminder Emails

Configuration

In Bookings → Configuration, set the Reminder days before event field to the number of days before an event that reminders should be sent.
Set to 0 to disable reminders.

How It Works

A daily cron job runs at 08:00 each morning. It:

Reads the configured reminderDaysBefore value.
Finds all events whose start date falls within the reminder window (today → today + reminderDaysBefore).
For each event, finds active bookings that have not yet received a reminder (no reminderSentAt timestamp).
Sends the reminder email and stamps reminderSentAt on the booking. Each booking receives at most one reminder — the process is idempotent.

Brevo Integration

Emails are sent via the existing Brevo transactional email pipeline.
The bookingNotificationConfigId must be set in the mail configuration to point to a valid Brevo notification config. If it is not configured, booking emails are silently skipped.
The resolved markdown template is rendered to HTML and injected into the Brevo template as the BODY_CONTENT merge field alongside the standard site merge fields (banner, signoff, app name, etc.).