coreBOS now has an abstraction layer to send emails. Instead of the hardcoded phpmailer library, we can easily use any email service to send emails like SendGrid, MailChimp or sendinblue among others.
We have created an internal API that abstracts the email service. We can use any email library or service to implement this API and have coreBOS sending emails with that service.
Once we created the API, we implemented the interface using the phpmailer library and set it as the default system to use, so anyone updating coreBOS will not notice any difference. Then, to make sure the change was correct we implemented an interface using SendGrid functionality and released that to the open source project.
You can get an idea of how that works watching the next video
As you can see in the video, not only do we have coreBOS sending emails through SendGrid, which gives us full control and statistics of outgoing emails but we get full status notifications INSIDE coreBOS. Note that this is much more powerful than an integration like the typical MailChimp or phplist integrations that existed before as we get all the email events directly in coreBOS and can launch workflows to automate any task in your coreBOS, we just connected a powerful BPM motor to our email outbox. seriously, the power is incredible.
Let me express that again. Many people approach us asking for an integration with MailChimp, they want to send their contacts to a MailChimp campaign and get new contacts and status updates from there because MailChimp gives them information about the email campaigns that are sent from there. There are variations on this request like synchronizing information with HubSpot or Act-ON (both integrations exist in corebos) because those platforms fill in some additional information. What we are implementing with features like this email API is to get the notification of those events directly inside your coreBOS, where your data already lives. There is no need to send contacts back and forth, send the events directly to coreBOS.
The API requires only three methods and an event handler to return a class path and name where coreBOS can find the three methods. you can continue reading here for an explanation on how that can be done.
The power of the coreBOS framework continues to grow!