Most email clients cannot apply external CSS stylesheets to the HTML code that makes up an email. Thus, we have to apply all styles inline. That is to say, by adding a style attrinute to every element that we would like to style. For example:

<td data-editable="text" style="background: #ede9df; font-family: courier; line-height: 150%; padding: 10px 20px 10px 20px;">
  First of all, we at African Burns Transformational Desert Experiences...
</td>

Doing this directly would be a complete pain in the ass. Life is too short to spend that much time copying and pasting. This node application allows you to create an HTML template with an external stylesheet, so you can write dynamic CSS in an external stylesheet, and it will apply them inline to every HTML element when you run the script.

Create a folder in the root of the email template folder, and name it what the template is named. Don't use spaces!

Inside this, create 2 folders. One named img and the other named thumbnails.

The img folder is where you place any images you would like to use in the template.

The thumbnails folder is where you place one 250px wide png image for each module. This is used in the email builder UI to show an image for each module, which acts as a preview for the person creating the email.

Each thumbnail must be named as the lowercase version of the id that is assinged to the module in template.html (See below).

For example if the module looks like this:

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class='module' id='Heading_4'>

</table>

The thumbnail for this module should be named heading-4.png, that being the lowercase version of Heading_4.

--baardskeerder ----template.html ----img ----thumbnails --new-template ----template.html ----img ----thumbnails

The Sendy email builder requires the layout to be implemented with tables and table cells. Floating divs do not work.

This is the file that we ultimately upload to the server, and it results in the drag and drop template that people can then use to create newsletters.

The template is split into modules. In the UI, each module is shown in a panel on the left, and they can be dragged into the email you are building, and then edited.

These modules, along with their HTML, styles and some default content are contained in template.json.

This is the file that you will create. The script takes this file and uses it to spit out template.json.

You can add a <style> element at the top of the file, and write dynamic CSS styles there.

Beneath this, create a <div> element with the class container. It must have that class, as well as an id which is the name of the template.

This must not be the same as the name of any other template.

<div class='container' id='Baardskeerder'>

</div>

Inside this, create a <table> element for each module that you would like to add to the template.

Each one of these tables must have a unique id attribute and the class module. This will become the title of the module in the UI.

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class='module' id='Banner'>

</table>

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class='module' id='Heading_4'>

</table>

Don't apply a width of 100% to images in the CSS if you want them to be resizeable.

To ensure that an image can be resized in the template, set the width and height attributes in the HTML:

<img alt="" src="img/test-image.jpg" width="660" height="372">

Text, images and links need to be editable in the email builder. To add editablility to any element in your HTML template, use the data-editable attribute.

Add data-editable="text" to the relevant <td> element.

<td data-editable="text">
  Dear AfrikaBurn Community Member...
</td>

Add data-editable="image" to the <td> element which contains the <img> element.

<td data-editable="image">
  <img alt="" src="img/test-image.jpg" width="660" height="372">
</td>

Add data-editable="link" to the container <a> element.

<a class='link-button' data-editable="link" href='#'>Link button</a>

It is not necessary to upload template.json to the email builder each time you make an edit. Simply open template.html in your browser in order to view your progress as you work.

In the terminal, navigate to the email template directory and run:

node index.js template-name