Prestashop: cannot send email to user after account activation from BackOffice

Question

I've looked everywhere and can't find an answer to my problem. I want to unactivate user account on registration and afterwards activate it in BackOffice. I managed to do this but I want to send user an email when his account is activated so i added a button beside activate/unactivate radio button, i added the following in AdminCustomers.php

 <input type="submit" value="'.$this->l('   Send Email to inform user   ').'"/>

But i don't know how to send email. My question may seem very simple to you but I am new to php/html so it is a bit hard for me. I have searched and found many examples to send email but none of them seems to be working.

EDIT: The reason i'm doing this is that we have two types of clients: individuals and companies. And for companies we need to verify the provided info (ex:VAT number). And then activate the account because it gives them access to special prices.

Answer 1

I ended up creating a module for this. It works perfectly with Prestashop 1.5.

Answer 2

Where are you activating the account? You should just add code to send the email after the account has been activated - it doesn't seem to make sense to add an additional step (that the administrator could forget to take).

Within a module I would use something like the following:

private function _emailNewAccount($customer, $address, $messages)
  {
    $configuration = Configuration::getMultiple(array('PS_LANG_DEFAULT', 'PS_SHOP_EMAIL', 'PS_SHOP_NAME'));
    $id_lang = (int)$configuration['PS_LANG_DEFAULT'];
    $template = 'new_account';
$subject = $this->l('New Account', $id_lang);
    $templateVars = array(
      '{firstname}' => $customer->firstname,
      '{lastname}' => $customer->lastname,
      '{address1}' => $address->address1,
      '{address2}' => !empty($address->address2) ? $address->address2 : $this->l('--',     $id_lang),
      '{city}' => $address->city,
      '{postcode}' => $address->postcode,
      '{email}' => $customer->email,
      '{messages}' => is_array($messages) ? implode("\n", $messages) : (isset($messages) ? $messages : ''),
      '{phone}' => !empty($address->phone) ? $address->phone : $this->l('n/a', $id_lang),
      '{mobile}' => !empty($address->phone_mobile) ? $address->phone_mobile : $this->l('n/a', $id_lang),
      '{customer_id}' => (int)$customer->id
    );
    $iso = Language::getIsoById((int)($id_lang));
    if (file_exists(dirname(__FILE__).'/mails/'.$iso.'/'.$template.'.txt') AND file_exists(dirname(__FILE__).'/mails/'.$iso.'/'.$template.'.html'))
      Mail::Send($id_lang, $template, $subject, $templateVars, $customer->email,$customer->firstname.' '.$customer->lastname, $configuration['PS_SHOP_EMAIL'], $configuration['PS_SHOP_NAME'], NULL, NULL, dirname(__FILE__).'/mails/');
}

Obviously you also need to create the corresponding text and html email templates. These would be in my module dorectory in this case: /modules/mymodulename/mails/en/new_account.html /modules/mymodulename/mails/en/new_account.txt

You use the fields defined above within the template, so for the text-only template you might have in new_account.txt:

Hi {firstname} {lastname},

 You have just registered on {shop_name}.

 Address:

 {address1}
 {address2}
 {city}, {postcode}
 Telephone: {phone}, Mobile: {mobile}

 {messages}

It might be good if you include in your question what you have tried so far....