WYSIWYG Email Template Tool

Anvil Q&A
1

What I’m trying to do:
The app I am working has a ton of templates (30+) they are all basically HTML/Jinja2 templates. The downside is my users are not technically and they struggle to edit HTML/Jinja directly.

So the main app owner has asked for a way he can make edits without doing a request to the tech team (me.)

I was hoping to find a visual email editor that is more user-friendly that might be more successful for my usrers.

So the general idea is to embed an Email Editor into an Anvil App to allow my users to create and edit a library of email templates.

Fair disclosure, my research is now stale, I haven’t looked at this problem in maybe 18 months, but it seems it might be coming of the backlog in the near future; so I was hoping someone in the Anvil community has done work in this space.

Looking at tools like Bee Free as an embeddable email template editor.

I know email testing and validation is royal pain.

But has anyone out there done anything similar?

2

In my experience any template that is useful to me (you) is too complex for any non-developer user. Few users may be willing to try with markup formatting, anything more complex is doomed to fail.

In cases like this I don’t even try using a real template. Instead I create my own, much simplified version. I define a very small set of rules and set of exposed variables, something like this:

  • One row wrapped by == is bold and larger font, ie == This is a title ==
  • One word in square bracket is a variable, ie [CrateNumber]
  • Here is the list of variables:
    • CrateNumber
    • CrateWeight
    • CrateLength
    • CrateWidth
    • CrateHeight
    • TruckNumber
    • TruckWeight

I had some limited success with markup. That’s less scary than a real templating system. All I need to do is adding some variable substitution.

3

You could try this: EmailBuilder.js | Open-source email template builder | Waypoint