Addresses feedback that the previous timeline competed for
attention with the year and felt visually trapped inside the
event card.
- The card surface (cream background, hairline border, rounded
corners) is now built per-row from the avatar + content TDs.
The timeline TD sits on the page background to the right of
the card with a 16px gutter between them.
- Rail bumped from 1px to 4px, in a warm grey #cdc7be that
reads as a deliberate ribbon rather than a divider.
- Dots are 14px (up from 10), with a 4px page-coloured halo so
they punch through the rail. Single colour (nord10 blue) for
every event — no more per-event-type tinting.
- Each calendar day shows exactly one dot: rows are walked in
upcoming-anniversary order and any row whose $fact->jd matches
the previous row renders without a dot but keeps its date
text, so two May-17 deaths share one marker on the rail.
- Date display split into "17. MAI" (semi-bold 13px tracking)
and "1759" (light 11px, muted) on a second line, so the day
of the year reads as the primary axis and the year as
supporting context.
- Relationship label moved from inline "(your great-aunt)" to a
separate italic muted line beneath the name, so long
relationship strings don't crowd the event label.
Replaces the previous "depth in generations along the strict
lineal chain" definition (which excluded siblings, aunts, cousins
entirely) with the metric the user actually wants: the number of
descent-steps separating the target from the recipient's closest
direct ancestor or descendant.
Examples relative to the recipient:
- sibling: 1 (parent → sibling)
- great-aunt: 1 (great-grandparent → great-aunt)
- nephew: 2 (parent → sibling → nephew)
- first cousin: 2 (grandparent → aunt → cousin)
- second cousin: 3
- ego, parents, grandparents, ..., children, ..., great-greats: 0
- own spouse, step-parents, brothers-in-law: inherit partner's
distance (so spouse-of-distance-1 is also distance 1)
Implementation:
- Anchor set seeded with R's direct ancestors + R + direct
descendants (capped at 25 generations to bound runaway data).
- Multi-source BFS expanding by descent only.
- Spouse propagation at every level so a person and their
spouse always share the same distance.
- Memoised per (recipient xref, max distance).
Tree preference key and range kept (NEWSLETTER_LINEAL_DEPTH,
0–10, default 3); only the semantics and the user-facing label
+ help text change, with concrete examples in both English and
German.
Per-recipient: only direct ancestors and direct descendants
within a configurable number of generations (default 3) get the
full row treatment (avatar, icon, timeline). Everyone else falls
through to a compact text-only bullet list at the bottom of the
same section.
- New tree preference NEWSLETTER_LINEAL_DEPTH (range 0–10,
default 3) with a clearly-explained admin input.
- RelationshipPathFinder::linealKin() does two cheap recursive
expansions (ancestors and descendants only — no spouse or
sibling traversal) and returns the xref set. Memoised per
recipient within a dispatch run.
- Avatar attachments are filtered per recipient to only the
embeds actually referenced in their HTML, so summary-only rows
no longer inflate per-email size with unused images.
- Recipients with no PREF_TREE_ACCOUNT_XREF (external admin
addresses, users not linked to a record) see the entire
newsletter in detail — no lineal anchor to filter against.
- German translations for the three new section kickers ("Other
birthdays", etc.) and the admin input help text.
Each featured person now carries a parenthetical label relative
to the recipient: "Jane Doe (your mother) — 45th birthday",
"Karl Müller (your 4th great-grandfather) — death". Labels are
italic, muted, and only appear when a path can be computed.
- New RelationshipPathFinder service mirrors webtrees'
RelationshipService::getCloseRelationship BFS but with a
configurable depth (default 14 hops ≈ 7 generations) so it
reaches great-great-grandparents and beyond. Results are
memoised per (recipient xref, target xref) within one
dispatch run.
- nameFromPath() formatting is delegated to webtrees so the
label honours the configured UI language (German, English,
etc.) and gendered/inflected forms.
- The recipient's tree-bound Individual is looked up via
Tree::getUserPreference(user, PREF_TREE_ACCOUNT_XREF). External
admin-added recipients (no webtrees account, no linked record)
silently get no labels — names render plain.
- Trade-off: the view now renders once per recipient (instead of
once per language group), because the relationship map is
personalised. For typical subscriber counts the extra string-
concat cost is negligible compared to the SMTP send itself.
Drops the editorial-serif palette in favour of the actual
website tokens so the newsletter and the site read as one
product:
- Cream #f8f6f1 page, surface #efecea card patches with #ddd
hairline borders matching the .card component.
- Open Sans 300/400/500/600 throughout (Google Fonts @import,
Helvetica/Arial fallback).
- Nord accent colours: nord10 blue for birth + links, nord3
graphite for death, nord15 mauve for marriage anniversaries.
Each event row's timeline dot is colour-coded to its event
type, which gives the right-hand rail a quiet ribbon of
meaning when several event types appear in one card.
- Soft elevation on cards (1px shadow), thin underlines on
links — same affordance the site uses.
- Header/footer chrome simplified: small caps kicker in nord10,
light-weight site title, no ornaments.
Reworks the newsletter as a family-chronicle layout: ivory paper
background, deep oxblood ink, aged-gold accents, EB Garamond
display with Georgia body fallback.
- Inline SVG event icons (sparkle for birth, dagger for death,
interlocked rings for marriage). Falls back silently in
Outlook desktop; modern Gmail / Apple / iOS / Outlook 365
render them.
- Right-side gold hairline timeline running through the date
column of every event row, with a filled dot per entry.
- Person names link to their webtrees Individual page via
Individual::url() (absolute URL through route() → BASE_URL),
including the avatar circles.
- German strings added for the new section kickers
("Family Chronicle", "Living kin who will celebrate this
fortnight.", "Marriages still intact.").
Source media files can easily be multiple megabytes — embedding
the originals made a per-recipient email balloon to 10MB+. Each
avatar is now cover-cropped to 96x96 (HiDPI for the rendered
48px circle) and re-encoded as JPEG q=75 via Intervention\Image,
which webtrees already depends on. Typical avatar payload drops
from megabytes to ~5-15KB.
Falls back to the original bytes (with a log warning) if neither
Imagick nor GD is loaded — better an oversized email than none.
The "once-per-calendar-month" gate that prevents the historical
section from appearing on every regular send also suppressed it
on admin "Send now" previews after the first run of the month —
making the section silently disappear when re-testing the email.
Force-send now bypasses the gate but still updates the
last-historical-month stamp, so the real monthly cadence stays
intact for cron-driven sends.
Pull each individual's highlighted media image via webtrees'
Individual::findHighlightedMediaFile, attach as Symfony inline
parts with stable cid:avatar-<xref> identifiers, and render
border-radius:50% on the <img>. Couples on anniversaries show
both spouses' circles side-by-side.
Fallback when no image is available (privacy-hidden record, no
OBJE, external URL, unreadable file): a CSS-only coloured circle
with the person's initials. The hue is derived from a hash of
the XREF so the same person keeps the same colour across
newsletters.
Done via a NewsletterMailer subclass of EmailService that adds a
sendWithEmbeds() method — the parent's transport() and DKIM
config still apply, only the message-construction path differs.
Recurring email newsletter for webtrees 2.2+. Each enabled tree
sends upcoming birthdays of living individuals, optional marriage
anniversaries of intact couples, and a once-per-calendar-month
historical section of births and deaths of deceased individuals.
Triggered exclusively by an external scheduler (system cron,
systemd timer, etc.) hitting a token-gated HTTP endpoint — never
on visitor page loads. The "is it due?" decision is idempotent
within the configured frequency window.
Per-user subscription is integrated into the built-in
/my-account/{tree} page via a custom view + a decorated
AccountUpdate handler. Admins can add external addresses and
trigger an immediate send for testing. Email body renders in
German for German-language users; English otherwise. Birthdays
and anniversaries are formatted with the upcoming-event ordinal
age (e.g. "45th birthday" / "45. Geburtstag").
Alexander