Peter's Blog

I'm very pleased to announce that the new MailBuild editor has just been pushed live and is now available to all of your clients. We covered the list of new features here last week, but here's a quick summary if you missed it:

1. Multiple repeater support - Include as many repeaters in your templates as you'd like.
2. Inline CSS - We automatically move all your CSS inline when sending the campaign for the best results in all email clients.
3. Drag and drop - Move repeater items quickly and easily.
4. Live preview - See precisely how your content looks as you type.
5. Bigger, resizable WYSIWYG editor - Great for clients adding big chunks of content to their campaigns.
6. Huge performance increase - Rebuilt from the ground up, feels like you're editing a local document.

The only change to the template tagging structure is the addition of a new toc='true' attribute in the repeater tag, which I'll discuss in more detail below. We've also put together a sample template that includes multiple repeaters and uses this new attribute.

Download the sample template (including Photoshop files - 2.5mb .zip)

Now that the new editor is out in the wild, we'll also be releasing a whole bunch of new sample templates that take advantage of the more flexible editing environment. Look out for an announcement here soon.

Answers to common questions

Will my old templates break?

Not a chance, the editor will continue to work for all your older templates. In fact, there have been no changes to the current templates tags, you can just include as many repeaters as you like, instead of the previous limit of one.

What happens to the table of contents when there are multiple repeaters?

As you know, we automatically populate your table of contents tag as your client adds items to their template. Now that we support multiple repeaters, you can tell us which repeater should populate the table of contents with the toc='true' attribute in your <repeater> tag. Here's how it looks for a repeater that includes a title, description and image...

<repeater toc='true'>
  <$title$>
  <$description$>
  <img src="/<$imagesrc link='true'$>" width="200">
</repeater>

If you have the table of contents tags along with multiple repeaters and no toc='true' attribute is present, we'll use the first repeater found in your code.

Can I have a repeater that is just images and no text?

You sure can. Previously a repeater needed to include a title, but you can now have image-only repeaters. This means, for example, you could include a photo gallery in your template, among other things.

We do have more plans for the editor moving forward, such as making it easier for your clients to add personalization tags and giving more sophisticated clients a more advanced editor. In the mean time, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the new editor and any suggestions on how we could make it even better.