Tags in Mailster

Tags are placeholders in your campaigns and are an essential part of Mailster. They always get replaced with their desired content when

• the campaign is prepared to send
• you preview the campaign
• you visit the web version of a campaign

You can set them anywhere in your newsletter template with the format {tagname}. Custom field tags are individual for each subscriber.

You can set alternative content {tagname|alternative content} which will be used if [tagname] is not defined. All unused tags will get removed in the final message

Check out the “Tags” Tab on the Settings page!

Dynamic Tags

A dynamic tag is wrapped in brackets like the other tags and starts with the post type followed by an underscore and the content to display. After a colon can be a negative integer like -3 which represents the third latest entry of the selected post type.

Relative tag and Absolute tag explained

Some examples:

• {post_title:-1} ➨ displays the latest post title
• {page_title:-4} ➨ displays the fourth latest page title
• {post_image:-1} ➨ displays the feature image of the latest posts (used in the URL field of the edit bar)
• {post_image:-4|23} ➨ displays the feature image of the fourth latest posts. Uses the image with ID 23 if the post doesn’t have a featured image (used in the URL field of the edit bar)
• {post_content:-1} ➨ displays the latest posts content
• {post_excerpt:-1} ➨ displays the latest posts excerpt or content if no excerpt is defined
• {post_date:-1} ➨ displays the latest posts date
• {post_title:23} ➨ displays the post title of post ID 23
• {post_link:15} ➨ displays the permalink of post ID 15

Instead of “post_” and “page_” you can use custom post types too.

Available Dynamic Tags

The following tags can be used in your campaigns. All of them use the regular post type post and the last one (-1) is an example.
You can replace post with the slug of your post type like page or product:

{product_title:-1}

The relative tag can be replaced with an actual ID of the post:

{post_title:123}

* all date and time formats are defined in the General Settings of your site
** The tag you can only use in the URL field of the pic picker

All tags run through a filter mailster_replace_[posttype]_[type]

Example

Append custom content to the “post_content”

add_filter( 'mailster_replace_post_content', function( $replace, $post, $extra ) {

    // appends custom content
    $replace .= '<br>My custom content';

    return $replace;
}, 10, 3);

Change the date format of “post_date”

add_filter( 'mailster_replace_post_date', function( $replace_to, $post, $extra ) {

    // display as 12th June
    return date( 'jS F', strtotime( $replace_to ) );

 }, 10, 3);

More tags you can use

Next to dynamic tags, there are further tags you can use in your campaigns.

* the text of the link can get changed on the “Texts” tab in the settings
** only used in a notification template
*** service can either be twitter, facebook, google or linkedin

Add your own dynamic tags

Sometimes you need to add some custom dynamic content to your newsletters. You may use it for coupon codes, custom status, or even the weather in a specific region. To achieve that you can start with this snippet

add_action( 'mailster_add_tag', function(){

  mailster_add_tag( 'mytag', 'mytag_function' );

}

function mytag_function( $option, $fallback, $campaignID = NULL, $subscriberID = NULL ){
     return 'My Tag: Option: '.$option."; Fallback: ".$fallback;
}

If you add this to your themes function.php you can use {mytag} in your newsletters.
If you add options to the tag like {mytag:my_option} you find this value in the $option variable
To define a fallback value in your tag use {mytag|my_fallback} or {mytag:my_option|my_fallback} to add ‘my_fallback’ in the $fallback variable.