Question

So I am setting up a welcome message when a user signs up the website – previously I had set it up using gmail (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5793296/rails-actionmailer-w-devise-google-apps-in-development-mode), but it’s going to be using google apps – so if I’m correct another stackoverflow user claimed the set up is similar so that’s not a problem. But since I only want a welcome email, I was thinking can I just use the confirmable set up so they get an email, and then in the config set it so that the user doesn’t have to confirm till after say 1000 years or something large so basically it’s not really a confirmation email? (If there is a better way to do this I’d appreciate such input)

Answer 1

you don’t need to twist the Confirmable feature to achieve this, you can do it more elegantly with an ActiveRecord::Observer. Basically when you register/save a user the observer will get notified and from there you can call a mailer. You can see an example below.

app/mailers/user_mailer.rb

class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
  default from: "[e-mail]"

  def welcome_mail(email)
    mail(:to => email, :subject => "Welcome to Something").deliver
  end
end

app/models/user_observer.rb

class UserObserver < ActiveRecord::Observer
  # We check if it's a new user
  def before_save(user)
    @is_new_record = user.new_record?
    true
  end

  def after_save(user)
    # If it's not a new user we don't want to send them another welcome email
    if @is_new_record then
      UserMailer.welcome_mail(user.email)
    end
  end
end

Finally you need to configure rails to register the observer.

config/application.rb (just a extract)

config.active_record.observers = :user_observer