Multilingual Email Greeting

Question

CiviCRM for WordPress 4.7.15

Problem: Fix the Email Greeting, so it takes advantage of the preferred language and gender fields. I took a look at:

https://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Recipe+for+German+Name+and+Greetings+Handling

The page to edit the Email Greeting is hidden under Administration/System Settings/Option Groups - Email Type Greeting Options

I came up with the following which works nicely when used in a Smarty Message Template.

{capture assign=l}{contact.preferred_language}{/capture} 
{capture assign=g}{contact.gender}{/capture} 
{if $l="en_CA"}Dear{else}{if $g="Male"}Cher{else}Chère{/if}{/if} {contact.first_name} {contact.last_name}

To test it, one selects the new Email Greeting from the drop down on the Contacts Summary page in the Communication Preferences section. Then clicks Save. At this point, the CiviCRM says.

Any suggestions? I'm considering adding 3 Greetings and updating all 2697 records via SQL.

Answer 1

I am a bit of a hurry at the moment - we use a greeting based on the prefix - maybe it helps:

{capture assign=c}{contact.communication_style}{/capture}{capture assign=p}{contact.individual_prefix}{/capture}{if $p=="Frau"}Liebe{else}Lieber{/if}{ }{if $c=="Familiar"}{ }{contact.first_name}{else}{$p}{ }{contact.formal_title}{contact.last_name}{/if}

Answer 2

Meanwhile, we have developed a new extension which may help people struggling with many different and or/complex greetings. The extension (including documentation) can be found here.