In Laravel 5.4 You Can Use Markdown in Your Emails

Laravel 5.3 introduced two new features around email, the Mailables and Notifications which allow you to send the same message through email, SMS, and other channels.

Building on top of these improvements, Laravel 5.4 is going to include a brand new Markdown system for creating email templates.

Under the hood, this feature implements the Parsedown parser with its companion, Markdown Extra so you can use tables.

Email Components

This feature builds on top of the new Components and Slots that Blade will support. It comes included with the following mail components:

• button
• footer
• header
• layout
• message
• panel
• promotion
• subcopy
• table

These can be used inside your email template like this:

@component('mail::button', ['url' => $actionUrl, 'color' => $color])
{{ $actionText }}
@endcomponent

Using Markdown for Mailables

Once you’re running 5.4, to begin using Markdown in your Mailables all you need to do is use the ->markdown in your build method:

return $this->markdown('emails.thanks');

Then, in your “thanks” email, you can use any of the provided components listed above. Here is an example of the email source and results:

Using Markdown for Notifications

Notifications are switching to this style by default, and there isn’t anything you specifically need to do. However, if you would like to customize your notification messages you can use Artisan to move the template to your resources folder with:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=laravel-notifications

Inline Styling

Just writing your emails in Markdown is great, but what about all the styling aspects? By utilizing the CssToInlineStyles all your templates will run through it before sending. This means you no longer have to dirty up all your email templates with nasty inlined styles.

Litmus Tested

The default email layouts are also Litmus tested and utilize Postmark’s templates. You can feel safe sending these out even to those running obscure email clients or ones which are hard to develop against.

New Artisan Flags

Now, when you run Artisan to make a new mail or notification you can pass the markdown flag to the view name:

php artisan make:mail --markdown=view.name
php artisan make:notification --markdown=view.name

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