Weeks 1 through 8 built five separate pieces of this system — the job model, the queue service, the background worker, the branded templates, and the admin dashboard — largely one at a time. Week 9 was the week those pieces had to hold together: going back through mentor review comments on all five open MRs (!1235, !1238, !1241, !1242, !1246) and testing the flows end-to-end rather than in isolation.
Dropped CakePHP’s migration system for email_jobs and replaced it with a plain SQL schema file. The cakephp/migrations and robmorgan/phinx packages came out of composer.json, and Migrations plugin loading was removed from Application.php. status and attempt_count on the EmailJob entity were locked down from mass assignable to fully protected. URL validation was tightened to FILTER_VALIDATE_URL, and contributionDeclined finally got the same payload validation as the other four mailer actions.
Review flagged a duplication risk: Redis queue key logic lived separately in TaskComponent and EmailQueueService, which could drift out of sync. That got pulled into a single QueueKeys service both now depend on. EmailQueueService also picked up a $queueRegistered flag so the queue registers once per instance instead of on every call. Added test coverage for custom priority/retry persistence, once only registration, and a new LpushFailingRedisClient double for the case where Redis accepts the connection but fails partway through the push.
The heaviest round of changes. Dispatch logic — validating a job’s payload and resolving the target user moved out of the worker loop into its own EmailJobDispatcher service. A new UndeliverableEmailException lets the worker cancel a permanently bad job outright instead of retrying it uselessly until attempts run out.
EmailQueueService gained an enable/disable toggle with a synchronous fallback so mail still sends if the queue is deliberately turned off. The worker now checks the email_jobs schema exists before starting and retries with exponential backoff. ForgotController rolls back the reset token if queuing fails, so a failed enqueue doesn’t leave a dangling token. email_worker was added to the Docker configs across every dev environment, with Redis switched to enabled by default.
UpdateEventsController‘s contribution declined notification was still calling the mailer directly instead of going through the queue switched to EmailQueueService, with error handling so a queuing failure doesn’t block the decline action. BrandedEmailTrait‘s logo-CID handling was cleaned into a dedicated cdliLogoCid() method, and both layouts now fall back to text branding cleanly instead of risking a broken image. All five templates were standardized to route user facing strings through __() so they’re actually translatable.
Added the retry routes and the display layer helpers the dashboard view needed — getDisplayStatus(), getEmailTypeLabel(), getEmailTypeOptions(), and recipient resolution on EmailJobsTable. Built out the dashboard view with stats widgets, a filterable job list, a recent errors panel, and auto submitting filters. It’s now linked from the main admin dashboard as “Email Monitoring,” visible to super admins only, with a first controller test confirming it’s actually gated behind admin auth.
With fixes landed on all five MRs, I spent the back half of the week running the flows together rather than per feature — a password reset moving through validation, the queue, the worker’s dispatcher, the translated templates, and showing up correctly on the dashboard. That combined pass caught mismatches at the seams between components, the kind unit tests on individual pieces wouldn’t.