Externalized Text in Pages and Emails

Externalized Text or “messages” supports the goals of Making the Software Fit Your Business and DRY by putting all the static text for your pages in one place to manage, and even rename the DonorPoint objects in applications to suit your internal vocabulary.

Externalized Text are defined on the Integration tab on your Account, and the Customization tab on pages. Externalized Text are context variables on your account and your forms with the form: key=value where key is the name of the text and value is its value.

The context variable messages contains all the externalized text available in the current context. This will include the default DonorPoint values for externalized text, overridden by those for your account, and further overridden by those for a page, if one or one of its autoresponders is being rendered.

For example, your Page Templates may include a common copyright merge tag:

#{messages.copyright}

which is defined in your Account properties of individual page properties:

copyright=©2022-23 Your United Way

Externalized text messages can include HTML tags, and EL script which is evaluated before they are rendered, and other context variables available will vary per use, see individual documentation on Advanced Customization per topic.

When the messages item is populated for use on a form or in an email, it gets its values from your account, then overwrites these with any on the specific page or one of its autoresponders being rendered. In this way you can have a set of your general externalized text, which you then customize for a particular page.

DonorPoint uses this function for its own text, so when a label in a DonorPoint application is being rendered, it is rendered from a DonorPoint general set of externalized text, which are overwritten by externalized text in your Account, and in a specific form being rendered.

Some objects in DonorPoint have properties for text labels, prompts, confirmations, etc. For example a contact block field in a page, custom field, and payment method all have prompt text and confirmation text properties. These can include EL script, and thus include the messages context variable. And because those externalized texts can also contain EL script, you can have levels of re-use in your designs.

Language Support

By default all externalized text are language neutral, meaning they will be shown on pages regardless of the browser’s preferred language. Language specific versions of externalized text can be created by adding the ISO two-letter country code after a underscore:

copyright=©2022-23 Your United Way
copyright_es=©2022-23 Su United Way
copyright_fr=© 2022-23 Votre United Way

Note that externalized text uses UTF-8 encoding to support non-ASCII data.

The list of ISO country codes can be found at the ISO Online Browsing Platform (OBP)

Externalized text created for your templates as part of account configuration and ongoing support will be added to your account and pages.

The list of default externalized text for DonorPoint changes from time to time and can be obtained by a request at help@donorpoint.com