Re: Email Templating and Customization Enhancements for Dada Mail

 
From: "Justin J justin@PROTECTED [Dada Mail Developers]" <dadadev@PROTECTED>
In-Reply-To: (no subject)
Date: August 18th 2016
Update on this: 

I've successfully harnessed the Foundation for Emails workflow to work with Dada Mail. At the moment, I can send a confirmation message in an HTML message that looks and acts pretty well in most email clients, including being *responsive*, which is awesome (think mobile phone users). 

Making this work on all the other transactional emails just means writing out the email and making some simple changes in Dada Mail's source. 

The next big hurtle will be getting actual mass mailings to use the framework somewhat flawlessly. I don't forsee this being really all that impossible, but I'm sure surprises await… 

The big rub (if you can call it that) is all these messages will NOT be editable from within the list control panel - the HTML produced is just nuts, and no casual user will be able to edit it, without totally mucking absolutely everything up. Take my word for it. 

Rather, I'll be introducing the idea of email themes, so that you can pick which email theme you'd like, and Dada Mail will load that theme up for your mailing list. I'll ship with a few different themes to start out with (or color variations of the same theme) and directions on how to make your own theme, which you can use just for yourself, or share. You'll be able to use the default theme as a starter, and just make your changes there. The workflow looks like this: 


I've created a new project for the default theme I'm currently testing with at, 


You can see how simple the markup is, before it gets run through the workflow: 


See my attached image on what that then produces - this is the HTML that gets created at the end. 


That's what I man by, "nuts" - that's what you need to make HTML email work with less Suck. 

I'm currently doing work on this project on this branch of the Dada Mail project, 


-- 

Justin J: Lead Dadaist. 
url:         http://dadamailproject.com
email:    justin@PROTECTED
twitter:  @dadamail
skype:   leaddadaist

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On Aug 9, 2016, at 1:51 PM, Justin J justin@PROTECTED [Dada Mail Developers] <dadadev@PROTECTED> wrote:


Just some basic rich text and some layout control (using tables) would be enough for me. Images would be nice but you can't rely on them displaying.

Well, all of that is already supported in Dada Mail. 

The Foundation for Email work I'm interested in doing is basically creating some themes for mass mailings, that you can apply to the message you've written. You can also create your own message with the Foundation workflow (I do that now), but I'm not integrating the workflow into Dada Mail - just supporting the workflow a little better (inlinifying and minifying the HTML for example) 

I'm also considering having a lot of the transactional emails Dada Mail produces be written in Foundation for Email's flavor of HTML. That can also be edited, like the PlainText version are, but no WYSIWYG for that either - creating the proper HTML for emails just doesn't lend itself well for rich text editors. It's honestly, a mess. 

-- 

Justin J: Lead Dadaist. 
url:         http://dadamailproject.com
email:    justin@PROTECTED
twitter:  @dadamail
skype:   leaddadaist

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On Aug 9, 2016, at 1:16 PM, Phil McKerracher phil@PROTECTED [Dada Mail Developers] <dadadev@PROTECTED> wrote:


Just some basic rich text and some layout control (using tables) would be enough for me. Images would be nice but you can't rely on them displaying.

-- 
Phil McKerracher
+44 7565 803841
www.beechesit.uk




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