FlowMattic Email Designer – newsletters

Tech Articles | April 16, 2025 | Automation, Blog, Coding, FlowMattic, Wordpress

Yesterday, FlowMattic released version 5.1.0, which has two features I am really excited about. I will be doing videos on Email Templates, the headline feature of 5.1.0, which comes first.

This post ist just to put some of the infromation for the vide

I found a suitable email template for the video, which can be found here and I began by building it out in flowmattic The finished flowmattic version used dynamic data for the view online, more details, unsubscribe and the headline photo as well as a new listing {{first_name}} dynamic data.

Once that was built which a sample can be seen below everything with a purple box is dynamic too.

I then began building out our workflow, which I decided to trigger using a custom menu using a custom action trigger in flowmattic you can see what that looks like below

The code for this menu is in the below codebox

<?php
add_action('admin_menu', 'custom_flowmattic_menu');

function custom_flowmattic_menu() {
    add_submenu_page(
        'tools.php',
        'Send FlowMattic Newsletter',
        'Send Newsletter',
        'manage_options',
        'send-newsletter',
        'render_flowmattic_newsletter_page'
    );
}

function render_flowmattic_newsletter_page() {
    // Handle form submit to save trigger ID
    if (isset($_POST['save_trigger_id']) && check_admin_referer('save_trigger_id_action')) {
        $new_trigger_id = sanitize_text_field($_POST['flowmattic_trigger_id']);
        update_option('custom_flowmattic_trigger_id', $new_trigger_id);
        echo '<div class="updated"><p>Trigger ID saved successfully.</p></div>';
    }

    // Handle "Send Newsletter" button
    if (isset($_POST['send_newsletter']) && check_admin_referer('send_newsletter_action')) {
        $trigger_id = get_option('custom_flowmattic_trigger_id');

        if ($trigger_id) {
            $data = array(
                'key' => 'value' // You can customize this
            );
            do_action('flowmattic_trigger_workflow', $trigger_id, $data);
            echo '<div class="updated"><p>Newsletter sent successfully using Trigger ID: ' . esc_html($trigger_id) . '</p></div>';
        } else {
            echo '<div class="error"><p>No trigger ID set. Please save one first.</p></div>';
        }
    }

    // Get saved trigger ID
    $saved_trigger_id = get_option('custom_flowmattic_trigger_id', '');
    ?>
    <div class="wrap">
        <h1>Send FlowMattic Newsletter</h1>

        <form method="post">
            <?php wp_nonce_field('save_trigger_id_action'); ?>
            <h2>Set or Update Trigger ID</h2>
            <table class="form-table">
                <tr valign="top">
                    <th scope="row">FlowMattic Trigger ID</th>
                    <td><input type="text" name="flowmattic_trigger_id" value="<?php echo esc_attr($saved_trigger_id); ?>" class="regular-text" required></td>
                </tr>
            </table>
            <?php submit_button('Save Trigger ID', 'primary', 'save_trigger_id'); ?>
        </form>

        <form method="post" style="margin-top: 2em;">
            <?php wp_nonce_field('send_newsletter_action'); ?>
            <?php submit_button('Send Newsletter', 'secondary', 'send_newsletter'); ?>
        </form>
    </div>
    <?php
}

PHP

The finished flow is shown below:

I had to use some custom code to extract the list in a more usable format, and i’ve used fluentcrm here but you can get the same data and format from an google sheet or an Air Table using flowmattic too.

<?php 
function extract_firstname_email_pairs($params) {
    //error_log("RAW PARAMS: " . print_r($params, true));

    $results = [];

    if (!empty($params['params'])) {
        $raw = stripslashes($params['params']);
        $contacts = json_decode($raw, true);

        if (is_array($contacts)) {
            foreach ($contacts as $contact) {
                if (!empty($contact['email'])) {
                    $results[] = [
                        'email' => $contact['email'],
                        'first_name' => !empty($contact['first_name']) ? $contact['first_name'] : ''
                    ];
                }
            }
        }
    }

   //error_log("FINAL RESULTS: " . print_r($results, true));
    return $results;
}