Successful registrations based of Customer group chosen - magento

Question

I am building an Magento site. Currently on the account registration form I have built it so there is drop down box which allows customers to choose their ‘Customer Group’.
If there are for example four different customer groups there are four different success emails the default Magento one, and 3 which I would create). What I need is based on which customer group is chosen the appropriate email is sent.
I have found the function which sends the new email in AccountController.php :
$customer->sendNewAccountEmail(
$isJustConfirmed ? 'confirmed' : 'registered',
'',
Mage::app()->getStore()->getId()
);
My initial thought would be to create the other email files in app/locale/en_US/template/email
But I don’t know which file/function chooses ‘account_new.html’ as the default email file so I could maybe implement some checks based of the customer group id.
I am unsure of the next steps to approach this such as how to edit this file and where to create the different success emails.

Answer 1

You'll likely need to overwrite the Mage_Customer_Model_Customer class to take control of the function sendNewAccountEmail(). This function is how the system decides which email to send and in theory you could override this function.
You probably know how to do an override, but just in case:
<models>
<customer>
<rewrite>
<customer>Namespace_Module_Model_Customer</customer>
</rewrite>
</customer>
</models>
Next, you'll want to create system configuration values, System.xml, you'll need to create a new entry for each "group" you have. This is no the most elegant solution as this is a static list and your groups could be dynamic. But to assign a template you'd either need a whole new module or update this file. But, now you can create transactional emails and assign it to each group in this system.xml file.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
<sections>
<yourmodule translate="label" module="yourmodule">
<class>separator-top</class>
<label>your module</label>
<tab>general</tab>
<frontend_type>text</frontend_type>
<sort_order>30</sort_order>
<show_in_default>1</show_in_default>
<show_in_website>1</show_in_website>
<show_in_store>0</show_in_store>
<groups>
<email translate="label">
<label>Email Templates</label>
<sort_order>1</sort_order>
<show_in_default>1</show_in_default>
<show_in_website>1</show_in_website>
<fields>
<group1_template translate="label comment">
<label>Group 1 Template</label>
<frontend_type>select</frontend_type>
<source_model>adminhtml/system_config_source_email_template</source_model>
<sort_order>1</sort_order>
<show_in_default>1</show_in_default>
<show_in_website>1</show_in_website>
<show_in_store>0</show_in_store>
</group1_template>
<group2_template translate="label comment">
<label>Group 2 Template</label>
<frontend_type>select</frontend_type>
<source_model>adminhtml/system_config_source_email_template</source_model>
<sort_order>1</sort_order>
<show_in_default>1</show_in_default>
<show_in_website>1</show_in_website>
<show_in_store>0</show_in_store>
</group2_template>
</fields>
</email>
</groups>
</yourmodule>
</sections>
</config>
Finally, the override for your sendNewAccountEmail():
class Namespace_Module_Model_Customer {
public function sendNewAccountEmail($type = 'registered', $backUrl = '', $storeId = '0')
{
$types = array(
'registered' => self::XML_PATH_REGISTER_EMAIL_TEMPLATE, // welcome email, when confirmation is disabled
'confirmed' => self::XML_PATH_CONFIRMED_EMAIL_TEMPLATE, // welcome email, when confirmation is enabled
'confirmation' => self::XML_PATH_CONFIRM_EMAIL_TEMPLATE, // email with confirmation link
'group1' => 'yourmodule/email/group1_template',
'group2' => 'yourmodule/email/group2_template',
);
if (!isset($types[$type])) {
Mage::throwException(Mage::helper('customer')->__('Wrong transactional account email type'));
}
if (!$storeId) {
$storeId = $this->_getWebsiteStoreId($this->getSendemailStoreId());
}
$this->_sendEmailTemplate($types[$type], self::XML_PATH_REGISTER_EMAIL_IDENTITY,
array('customer' => $this, 'back_url' => $backUrl), $storeId);
return $this;
}
}
Obviously there is a lot of room for improvement, namely coming up with a way to dynamically pull customer groups and created configurations from that and additionally adding those same dynamic checks to this function, but this is a simple static solution.