Coming next week: All new MailBuild editor
Posted by David Greiner on July 14, 2008 4:55 PM
The past few weeks we've been hard at work putting the final touches on an all new version of the MailBuild editor. It's launching this time next Monday (July 21st), but we wanted to give you a heads up on the new features we'll be including.
Here's a quick screencast showing some of the new features in action. You can also check out a higher quality version here.
Multiple repeater support
Of all the feature requests we've received for the editor, this has been the most popular by far. For many of you, a single repeater just didn't cut it. We've completely re-built the editor, allowing you to include as many repeating items in your template as you need.
Inline CSS
This is a big one. We now automatically move all of your template CSS inline for your clients when sending the email. This means a much more consistent rendering across all email clients, especially those with poor CSS support like Gmail and Outlook 2007.
You won't need to make any updates to your templates either, this will work automatically for all of your clients current template designs.
Drag and drop
Re-ordering the items in your newsletter is now as easy as picking it up and dropping it where you'd like. Even if you've coded your template using nested tables, you can still drag and drop any repeating items to change their order. No more moving items up and down click by click.
Live preview
Now your clients can see exactly how their content will look in the email as they type it. No more switching back and forth between editing and previewing just to see how your content will look. After using the new editor myself, I can personally vouch for how much of a time saver this is.
Bigger, resizable WYSIWYG editor
If your clients are adding lots of content to their emails, the limited size of the current editor made it hard to see a lot of what they were writing at once. The new editor maximizes use of the available screen real estate and can be resized to any height your client prefers.
Huge performance increase
The entire editor has been rebuilt from scratch and is now much faster than the original. This speed increase combined with the live preview feature make it feel just like working on a local document.
We'll be rolling out the new editor next Monday, so you might want to let your clients know in advance that these improvements are coming. The editor will still work in more or less the same manner, so your clients shouldn't have a problem picking up where the old editor left off.
We hope you like the changes, this is the first in a series of big updates we'll be making to MailBuild over the next few months. Look out for an update to the blog the moment the new editor goes live next week.
22 total comments:
Good stuff - I've been paying close attention to the MailBuild-feed, waiting for something like this :) I guess it's going to be a good few months!
This i just great, can't wait to get my hands in to the new features - repeating elements have been a big request - thx guys, keep up the great work.
And after commenting, I suddenly got the video as well..
Looks great!
A quick comment: I noticed that after clicking edit, you scrolled to find the right section to see the preview. Should this be automatic? Kind of like this:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/988-designing-details-autoscrolling-the-edit-state
Nice call Stig, I did that more for the purpose fitting the live preview updates in with the small window available in the screencast. When using the editor with a normal resolution, the section you're editing would be viewable.
Good catch though, we're definitely fans of getting the little things right, so any tips like this are very much appreciated.
Thanks for this enhancement. Looking forward to more good stuff soon (Google Analytics?).
Any chance you guys could edit the title that apears on the video from:
"The new MailBuild editor"
to just
"The new editor"
So as to let us resellers have the ability to use it please?
Many thanks
Great suggestion Vince, I've just jumped in and removed any mention of MailBuild in the title.
Brilliant.
Any chance we could download it to host it ourselves rather than embeded link to Vimeo?
Sure Vince, you can download the original Quicktime version here by creating a Vimeo account (only takes a few seconds).
Dave,
You are a star!
Maybe you can also have a word to get us the whitelabel MailBuild tutorial in the near future? ;-)
We definitely haven't forgotten about that one Vince, we'd just prefer to include the newer features that are coming soon. It's certainly in the pipeline though.
Looking good, I'm definitely more confident that it will be usable for our clients but at the same time also very useful for us, we have some clients who need a helping hand.
All very good. Looking forward to the next other releases over the the summer? Hopefully...
Could you provide the announcement email you just sent as a template? It would be great to send this onto our clients without any MailBuild reference. (like you did for the video)
Cheers
Also the Quicktime link is broken. Permission error on AWS
Thanks for the tip about the download, looks like you need to be a Vimeo user to access it. You can access the original Quicktime version by signing up to Vimeo and downloading the file in the bottom right corner.
Mark, you can check out the email here, feel free to re-use any elements you like.
I'm so glad you finally have multiple repeaters!
Good stuff folks! The multiple repeater functionality alone is worth the cost of the upgrade. Oh wait, it's free? Even better! ;)
Hi .. any chance on allowing for assigning French translation to certain clients? (or language control in general)
I have clients in multiple languages that I would like to support better and make them more autonomous.
Is there and talks about translations?
Thank you
Chris
This looks great -- the improvements are certainly welcome!
In the next revision, I'd love to see click-to-edit titles and entries a la Flickr (when editing photo titles and captions), which would be even more intuitive, bring the app even closer to the feel of a desktop WSYWIG editor, and save a some screen real estate at the same time. =)
Just wanted to say thanks and kudos for making this - tis really really good! =) Can't wait to try.
Thanks for ll the kind words guys, well be launching the editor later today. Chris, we don't have any immediate plans for offering the complete interface in other languages at this stage I'm afraid. It's certainly a long-term goal, but not something we're prepared to commit to at this time.
IdeaMan, we have avoided inline editing purely because the templates offer so much design flexibility, and his form of editing simply doesn't work for certain designs. For example, if you have a repeater in a skinny side column, editing inline means there is no room for a full WYSIWYG editor when making updates. By separating the editor from the design, your clients have a much easier and more consistent area to add/edit content.
Plus, the new live preview feature makes it easy to see exactly how it will look as you type. To me this is even better than inline editing Flickr style.
I'll be posting an update to the blog as soon as we're live.
I've noticed that when you make something bold in the editor you can't then highlight the word and take the bold formatting off. I assume this is a bug?
So far no good. Have had trouble with error messages (save your work) when I'm not in a section and no pop up windows for the picture links. Also, like Katy above, the bold and italics is hard to take on and off. And please, please add a Spellcheck option! It would also be great to resize the photo right in the newsletter instead of having to go into another software program.