Automated Reminders via E-mail

@since 1.1.0

This is the pre-installed Cron Job in the Vik Rent Car plugin. By choosing the Class File 'email_reminder.php' when adding a new Cron Job, you will be able to configure the parameters for setting up this recurring action. The job will use the native server functions to send the email messages so no particular configuration is required beside the installation of the Cron on your server to execute this job repetitively.

Once configured, the system will automatically send Email messages to the customers with a custom body to remind certain details of the rental order. The custom email text can be translated into other languages from the page 'Global - Translations' and it accepts HTML code even though there is not an HTML editor to compose it. You should use another editor and paste the HTML code in the text-area in this case. Pay attention when using HTML images because the same cron job could be executed from the front-end and from the back-end. For this reason you should not use any relative paths, just the full http source of the image hosted on your server or on any external server.

The parameters required are pretty simple:
- Reminder Type: Pick-up Reminder, Remaining Balance Payment Reminder, After check-out Message.
- Days in Advance for the notifications or days after the Drop-Off.
- Email Subject: no explanation should be necessary for this parameter 
- Message to be sent via Email. This text accepts special tags that will be replaced with the corresponding values such as {pickup_date}. All the available tags are the ones below the text-area field for the message. No other special tags could be used unless you decided to modify the PHP code of this Cron Job or, better, to create a new Cron Job Class File by following the Developers section of the Documentation.

If the Reminder Type is set to Pick-up Reminder, the system will fetch all the bookings with a check-in date in x days from the execution date. The x days value is defined with the parameter Days in Advance.

The Reminder Type Remaining Balance Payment Reminder will read all the rental orders with a booking total greater than zero and with an amount paid less than the booking total.

Lastly, the Reminder Type After Check-out Message, will take all the rental orders with a drop-off date that is x days in the past from the execution date. The number of days in the past are taken from the parameter Days in Advance.

This Cron Job stores in the database all the rental orders that get notified via Email successfully. This means that the cron job will never notify the same customer twice.

If no email messages are being sent to the customers, then you should check the configuration of the Custom Fields (there should be just one field of type Text marked as 'Email' and mandatory). Also, you should check the Sender Email address in the Vik Rent Car Configuration page because some Mail Servers could accepts the emails to be sent only from one specific postmaster address.