Customizing Email Notifications
Community Quiz sends branded, automated emails for the key moments in an assessment or course: an exam is assigned, a result is ready, a certificate is issued, a learner enrols, and more. Every one of these is an editable template. This guide explains where to edit them, how to brand them, and how the personalisation works.
Audience: Administrators who want emails to match their organisation's wording and brand. No coding needed.
Where emails are managed
Open Email templates from the admin navigation (under Organisation). You see every template the component can send, grouped by area. For each one you can edit the subject, the HTML body, the plain-text body, turn it on or off, and reset it to the shipped default. You can also preview a template before saving.
Templates ship with sensible defaults, so emails work out of the box. You only need to edit the ones you want to change.
The emails Community Quiz sends
| Area | Emails |
|---|---|
| Assessments | Exam assigned, Exam reminder, Attempt submitted. |
| Results | Result available, Grade released. |
| Grading | Manual grading required (to the grader). |
| Scheduling | Exam schedule changed, Proctor assigned. |
| Credentials | Certificate issued, Certificate expiring, Certificate revoked. |
| Courses | Enrolment welcome, Course completion, Access extended, Unenrolled, Learner message. |
| Publishing | Reviewer approval requested. |
| Question banks | Question review requested. |
| Users and roles | User invitation, Team invitation. |
Each template can be switched off if you do not want that notification sent.
Tip: the result, certificate, and enrolment emails are the ones most worth personalising first, since learners see them most.
Personalising with placeholders
Templates use double-curly placeholders that are filled in when the email is sent:
Hello {{name}}, your result for {{exam}} is ready.
Placeholders available everywhere
These are added to every template automatically:
| Placeholder | Becomes |
|---|---|
{{site_name}} | Your site name |
{{site_url}} | Your site address |
{{support_email}} | Your support address |
{{brand_color}} | Your brand colour |
{{notification_preferences_url}} | The link learners use to manage notifications |
Placeholders specific to each template
Each template also has its own placeholders for its context. For example:
- Certificate issued:
{{name}},{{exam}},{{credential_id}},{{issued_at}},{{verify_url}},{{download_url}}. - Learner message:
{{name}},{{course}},{{sender_name}},{{message_body}},{{course_url}}.
The editor lists the placeholders that apply to the template you are editing, so you always know what you can use.
Note: placeholders are case-sensitive and use double braces.
{{name}}works;{NAME}or{{Name}}will not.
Branding every email
Rather than editing branding into each template, you set it once in Settings → Emails, and it applies to all of them:
| Setting | Controls |
|---|---|
| Header title / subtitle / logo | The masthead at the top of every email. |
| Brand colour | The accent colour used in the email styling. |
| Footer text | The footer line (for example your company and address). |
| From name / From email / Reply-to | Who the email appears to come from. |
| Admin alert email | The address copied on staff-facing emails (grading, review, proctor). |
| Support email / Notification preferences URL | Used in the shared placeholders above. |
Because branding is centralised, your templates stay focused on wording, and a logo or colour change updates every email at once.
Languages
Each template can have a version per site language. When an email is sent, Community Quiz picks the version matching the recipient's language (for example en-GB or fr-FR) and falls back to the default if there is no match. To localise, edit the template with the relevant language selected.
Delivery
Emails are queued and sent through Joomla's mail system by default, which keeps the site responsive when many emails go out at once (for example a result release to a whole cohort). Staff notifications are copied to the admin alert address you set in Settings.
Troubleshooting
- A placeholder shows literally in the email. Check the spelling and the double braces, and that the placeholder belongs to that template (the editor lists the valid ones).
- An email did not arrive. Confirm Joomla's own mail settings work (Global Configuration → Server → Mail), check the template is enabled, and look in your spam folder.
- Branding did not change. Branding comes from Settings → Emails, not the individual template. Update it there and resend.
- The wrong sender address appears. Set From name / From email in Settings → Emails; if left blank, Joomla's global mail-from is used.
Related
- Certificates - the certificate issued, expiring, and revoked emails.
- Courses & Enrollment - enrolment, completion, and learner-message emails.
- Grading & Review - the grading and result-release emails.
- Installation & Configuration - where the email settings live.