HTML Emails - There must be a better way

gabrielp · Post by **gabrielp** » Fri Sep 26, 2014 8:17 pm

Hi all,

I have a few HTML emails, all with similar templates, but are different in the content. I use the Mail send configurator pointing to these html files. As of now, I have 8 emails I'm contending with. I'm gearing up to launch a new flow that will have another 8 or so.

This works fine, but if I ever need to swap a logo or change some part of the template, I'd have to update and test 16 (or more) individual files.

What I would really like is for Switch to import a header/footer (template) and to place my content in between. This is classic templating and something I'm doing all day with web applications. In fact, if I could have Switch reach out to "gettemplate.php?id=proof_alert" and have that PHP run and return the HTML, I could easily build in a templating system to achieve what I'm looking for. Unfortunately, Switch needs straight HTML.

So has anyone else run into this issue? Can anything be done? I was also toying with the idea of some sort of HTML compiler that would regenerate .html files every time a template change was made. Then I could track those html files in git and do a git pull to update all of my flows instantly!

Not looking to recreate the wheel, so if anyone has any suggestions, would love to hear them.

ArielRauch · Post by **ArielRauch** » Fri Sep 26, 2014 9:03 pm

I think one option is definitely xslt.

You can prepare a xslt scheme with some option which can be chosen according to metadata fields.

I did this - as you know:)

gabrielp · Post by **gabrielp** » Mon Sep 29, 2014 7:39 pm

ArielRauch wrote: I think one option is definitely xslt.

You can prepare a xslt scheme with some option which can be chosen according to metadata fields.

I did this - as you know:)
Ah yes. I'm going to look into this. I was able to find a clever way to generate HTML easily with a bit of PHP. I'm going to write up a quick guide on how I did it as I believe it's useful.