The previous border-spacing approach made each card stand on its
own — but it also fragmented the rail. Each rail segment ended
at the bottom of its row, leaving visible breaks between cards.
Restructured each event row to wrap the avatar+content cells in
a nested card table sitting in the row's left outer TD. The
right TD carries the rail as its border-left. With the outer
section table now using border-collapse:collapse, consecutive
rows' left-borders touch and merge into one unbroken line that
runs through the card gaps.
Added a downward triangle TR after the last event of each
section as a visual cap on the rail. Pure CSS (border-style
trick), coloured to match the rail.
- Each event row is now a self-contained card (full border on
all four sides, rounded all four corners). border-spacing on
the section table inserts a 10px vertical gap between cards
so they read as distinct entries. The timeline rail breaks
along with the cards, which actually reads better — each event
feels like its own beat on the timeline rather than rungs of a
ladder.
- When two events share an upcoming day, the second row
(dotless) used to repeat "17. MAI" — wasted vertical space.
It now only prints the year, bumped up to 14px so it carries
on its own. The always-visible year is also slightly larger
(13px vs 11px) and tonally lifted from #aaa muted to #777
tertiary so it pairs evenly with the day-month line above it.
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.
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.").
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