Anyone who has touched HTML emails knows the devilry involved. Kudos for developing and open sourcing this! Excited to try it out for my newsletter.
Show HN: Sendune – open-source HTML email designer
61–70 of 100 posts
Re: Show HN: Sendune – open-source HTML email designer
#62Looks awesome. Is there a way to load saved templates?
there's an export HTML functionality. you can use this to save templates once you embed this in your project.
I appreciate the response, but that's not what I was asking. I'll rephrase as a workflow question: After I make a design in your editor, I'll want to reuse that for future emails. Is there a way to load a saved design back in (that I previously made in your editor) so I don't have to redesign every email from scratch?
Re: Show HN: Sendune – open-source HTML email designer
#63This work looks very promising. "HTML for email" is indeed hard to design and hard to implement. Especially editing on mobile, tablet devices, or asian (two+ bytes japanese, chinese) languages input nightmare.
I do lot of email templating for B2B CRM use cases and decided to opt out for a bit different approach based on slatejs/platejs editor
https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate
https://github.com/udecode/plate
The internal representation of email template with variables in slatejs/platejs json format can look like:
{ "type": "h1", "children": [ { "text": " Blocks {{template_value}} {{$timenow}}}" } ], "id": "1" }
Can be easily stored in Postgres jsonb. Very easy to add Reacjs base widgets like mentioning, media, diagrams, etc inside of slatejs/platejs editor.
The drawback is that you can't design the exactly the same pixel perfect template.
The better abstraction is probably MJML - https://mjml.io/ ... and yet with slatejs/platejs json format you can copy&paste your editings across various assets in CRM, knowledge base, etc
Storing data in MJML is not a great choise for me
...
Was thinking about using something similar to /SendWithSES/Drag-and-Drop-Email-Designer as the last final step ... but couldn't settle it my brain and most end-users dont care anyway.
Any thoughts on data representations and "Postgres Editor > Email HTML > Send button" dataflow is greatly appreciated. Very few people have serious thoughts on the subject.
Re: Show HN: Sendune – open-source HTML email designer
#64Oh! I wasn’t expecting this. I’ll be here a couple of hours to answer any questions.
How did you reliably determine what works and what doesn’t in “untold combination of os/desktop/mobile clients“? Is there a description of that somewhere?
There is site for that https://www.caniemail.com/ . I don’t use it, even if I work on email marketing software, but I guess it might be useful sometimes.
Re: Show HN: Sendune – open-source HTML email designer
#65This work looks very promising. "HTML for email" is indeed hard to design and hard to implement. Especially editing on mobile, tablet devices, or asian (two+ bytes japanese, chinese) languages input nightmare. I do lot of email templating for B2B CRM use cases and decided to opt out for a bit different approach based on slatejs/platejs editor https://docs.slatejs.org/ https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate https://g…
You can set an at the top of the file for a given design format to simplify your code. So in your example, if you did:
That would allow you to simplify your callbacks to
You can also set CSS classes as well if you need something outside the MJML spec for some reason (which would potentially cover some of your cross-platform concerns).
MJML also integrates well with other languages. For example, I use a Craft CMS integration to pull data in via Twig to build complete templates directly from my CMS; there’s also an integration with Eleventy.
Re: Show HN: Sendune – open-source HTML email designer
#66[flagged]
I work in this space with hundreds of clients and tens of thousands of email templates and literally zero use plaintext as the primary templating option for marketing emails. None of them.
Re: Show HN: Sendune – open-source HTML email designer
#67No MJML feels like a mistake. I design emails and that is literally the most important feature to me.
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Re: Show HN: Sendune – open-source HTML email designer
#68No MJML feels like a mistake. I design emails and that is literally the most important feature to me.
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Re: Show HN: Sendune – open-source HTML email designer
#69[flagged]
This is not a good Show HN comment. There's nothing these people can do with this feedback, and it's litigating a tired internet trope. It's 2024, people overwhelmingly use HTML email, and this is not a thread intended to investigate whether that's a good thing or not.
>people overwhelmingly use HTML email
If that is true, it is only true because email providers are making a choice on behalf of consumers, namely, the user writes plain-text emails (at, e.g., gmail.com) then the provider converts it to HTML.
Re: Show HN: Sendune – open-source HTML email designer
#70No MJML feels like a mistake. I design emails and that is literally the most important feature to me.
Because someone keeps commenting and immediately deleting their comments in reply to this: MJML is a tool to essentially “fix” email, which essentially has to work around out-of-date clients and incomplete HTML specs.
If it feels out of date, it’s because HTML email itself is out of date.