Dec 7, 2012
Drag and Drop Editor Updates in v7.8
It’s been a busy few weeks since we released our new drag and drop editor. While we were working hard on changes and features, we also paid attention to the tweets, blog comments, and feedback coming in about it. Most of what we’ve heard has been pure excitement (yay!), but we also picked up a bunch of ideas for making it better. Several of those concepts made it into this week’s v7.8 release. Ben already gave a good overview of the v7.8 changes a few days ago, but I thought I’d share more details on our changes to the editor.
New Social Blocks
Our old social block
If you’ve used any of the basic or predesigned templates in our old editor, you’re probably familiar with the image on the right. We considered this standard social block so critical to email campaigns that we even included it in the open source Email Blueprints that we’ve been maintaining on Github. While these blocks are very popular, the old editor doesn’t allow much flexibility. If you wanted to link to other social networks or change their appearance, you were out of luck.
For the new editor, we wanted to make inserting and configuring social links into your emails much easier so we’ve added two new blocks: Social Follow and Social Share.
The Social Follow block is similar to that old social block I showed above but a lot more flexible. It allows you to provide links to social networks where your readers can follow or connect with you. All you have to do is drag the block into your campaign and:
- Add the networks you want to include from the content tab.
- Set background, border, and font styles in the Style tab.
- Configure your layout options on the Settings tab.
After a few clicks, I had a social block that looked pretty good with the simple black and white demo campaign I created for this post.
In that old social block I mentioned before, there was a “Forward to Friend” link. When we thought about it, this action didn’t match up with the “Follow on Twitter” and “Friend on Facebook” links it was paired up with. Forwarding an email is a sharing action. Instead of rolling that into the Social Follow block, we created a separate one called Social Share.
The Social Share block allows your readers to share either the archive of your email campaign or a specified URL on a variety of different social networks. Here’s what the content tab looks like in the Social Share block:
By default, the links inside the social share blocks are designed to look like the small buttons that are typical for sharing on social media sites.
While these buttons look good on a light background, there’s just too much contrast to use them on the dark gray in my campaign. After a little tweaking in the Style and Settings tabs, they fit in pretty well.
Now Available for RSS and A/B Split Campaigns
If you tried to use the drag and drop editor with a non-regular campaign type before, you’ve probably experienced this:
Well, you’ll be seeing that disabled option a lot less now. The drag and drop editor now works for new RSS and A/B split campaigns. Also, if you create an RSS campaign with the drag and drop Editor, you’ll also notice two new blocks in the Content tab: RSS Header and RSS Items.
Most RSS feeds contain information about the source site (like a blog title and description) as well as the repeated data for each post (post title, url, date, author, etc.). The new RSS Header block allows you to include information about the feed and the RSS Items block let’s you control what repeated post information to display. We’ve had RSS merge tags to pull in all that feed information ever since we started doing RSS-to-email campaigns, but the new RSS blocks make it a lot easier.
In both new RSS blocks, there are a few presets to choose from.
Or you can go completely custom, styling and arranging the merge tags however you like:
If you want to see how all those asterisks and vertical bars will render your blog content, just click Preview & Test, and open up preview mode.
Finally, to make it even easier, we added a couple templates that come pre-filled with RSS Header and RSS Item Blocks. If you’ve created an RSS campaign, just looks for the RSS icons in the corner.
Obsessing Over Tiny Details
You might think that the new Social and RSS blocks took the majority of our time during this release, but that’s definitely not the case. We made a lot of seemingly insignificant changes that (we hope) will make the overall experience a lot better. Here are a few of my favorites:
Code Syntax Highlighting
As someone who writes a lot of HTML and CSS, switching to source view in the MailChimp editor always drove me nuts. Most code editing applications change the color of HTML tags, attributes, and attribute values to make the code easier to read. In our old code editor, all the text was the same color, which made the HTML doubly hard to read in a narrow editor column. We changed the source mode in the drag and drop Editor to use a tool called CodeMirror that does that fancy color changing business and adds line numbers. Let’s take a look at that RSS Items block code again with source view turned on:
Ahh…much better. To all of us code monkeys, at least.
Right-To-Left Text and Native Spell Checking Support
While we were working on the text editor, we made a couple of other minor changes. First off, you’ll notice a couple new buttons in the extended tool set.
Those icons change the text direction to left or right to support languages that are written from right to left. Also, since most browsers now handle spell checking with a right-click, we changed the default right click behavior of the editor so that it uses the browsers context menu instead of the editor’s, which typically only displayed one option—paste.
Note: You can still get to the editor’s proprietary right-click menu by holding down CTRL (or CMD on mac), then right-clicking.
Keyboard Shortcuts
You might think keyboard shortcuts are for nerds and power users, but they can really help speed up the process of creating campaigns. We’ve been adding keyboard shortcuts here and there since we started working on the new editor. We’ve revealed some of those as hints. For example, holding down alt while clicking the delete icon on a block allows you to skip the confirmation dialog:
We decided we couldn’t just keep sticking “hints” like this everywhere so we started a little keyboard shortcut cheat sheet. Just type ? from the new editor to see the list. There’s not much there yet, but now that we have a place to share them, we’ll be adding more.
Color Picker Improvements
The color picker you see in the new editor looks like it did before, but we changed a few things under the hood to make it easier to use.
First off, we improved the actual picker behavior. Before, it was hard to click and drag that little bullseye or the slider bar around. You kinda had to click around which made it hard to get the color you wanted. We also added some logic to make it handle hex colors with no # (which you get when pasting hex codes from Photoshop), multiple #’s, abbreviated hex codes like F00, which gets correctly changed to #FF0000 and even RGB codes like rgb(255,221,0), which becomes #ffdd00.
We have several more ideas in the works to improve color selection and management in your campaigns, but removing some of the frustration from the picker and input box had to happen first.
Fixed-Width Right Panel
When we created the split-pane layout in the new editor, we decided to set each column to a percentage of the window width. By default, these widths were 61.8% on the left and 38.2% for the right column. (Design nerds will know why.) The idea was to give you more space in both columns as you resized your browser window. It was a great idea in theory, but in practice, the right column felt clunky when resizing the window, and looked awkward when it was really wide. Now, the right column starts out at 440px and stays that wide unless you adjust it with the little drag handle at the top.
Smarter Image Dropping
Being able to drag images directly into the image placeholders in your campaign saves a lot of time, but there were some things that frustrated us with it. We found ourselves trying to drag an image onto an existing image to replace it, and…nothing happened. We also tried to drag three images into an image block that had three images and it only uploaded one. Blurgh. We fixed both of those issues.
Image Centering on Top and Bottom Captions
In the blocks that contain images, we always encourage you to upload files that are at least 600px wide.
If you’re using that image in a 30% wide image with caption block, it allows you to keep the same image if you switch to a full-width top or bottom caption. More importantly, it ensures that the image will look good when the columns adjust to 100% in mobile mode.
Sometimes, though, you’re stuck with a smaller image. Before, that image would be stuck to the left side of the block. To fix that, we added an image alignment option in the settings tab of top and bottom captions.
Planning for the Future
As you can tell, we’ve been working hard on improving the new editor, but we’re far from done. We already have a few tricks up our sleeves for the next release, but the one feature that will be our biggest priority is adding the ability to Save as Template. That has been, by far, the most common feature request, but it’s a bigger task than it seems. Campaigns in the new editor are not merely raw HTML but arrays of configuration information for the blocks inside them. Also, allowing the saving of new editor templates means you have to be able to import and export them. It’s a complicated problem, but one that we look forward to tackling.
We’ve also been kicking around ideas for new blocks, ways to better handle merge tags and how to tackle conditional content. If you’ve been using the new editor, please let us know what you think in the comments, or via our feedback form. We’re listening (in a totally non-creepy sorta way). For now though, it’s time to wrap up this long post and get back to that pesky Save as Template task.
Drag on my friends, drag on.
Posted By
wmwebdes
Looks fantastic.
Should have time over the Christmas break to move over to Mailchimp from Feedburner.
Drag and drop looks fantastic.
12.07.2012
Cindy Mihalko
Sweeet! You chimparoos rock! I am so excited to add the Social follow and Social share to my newsletters. Of course, I’ll have to play with the many other goodies too!
Monkey hugs!
12.07.2012
Rishi Shah
you guys are crazy fast at taking feedback and putting it into the MailChimp app just a few weeks later. nice work!
12.07.2012
Audrey Orenstein
Created my first campaign with the new editor today and it was pretty easy. Had a bit of a problem with some of the text blocks. I loaded in text that was pre-formated to fit a width (not left, right or centered, but spanning), and one of the blocks would not stay formatted like that and there was no style button to play with. Feel free to take a peek – it’s still a draft called Introducing Social Know-how. Overall, the editor was pretty easy, but the text size was hard to get even — the preformatted loaded text kept screwing things up, I think.
12.07.2012
Jason
For the sake of consistency, it’s best to paste in text with no formatting and do the formatting in the editor. Try highlighting the whole block and then clicking “clear formatting”. Some of the style buttons are collapsed by default. To get to them, click the down arrow to the right of the formatting tools in the text editor.
12.08.2012
Vaclav
Can a campaign created with this new drag and drop editor be saved as a template? I did not find the “Save to My Templates button”.
12.08.2012
Jason
No, not yet. As I explained at the end of the post, we’re still working on that. For now though, you can always use the campaign you created again by hovering over it on the main campaigns page and clicking the “replicate” link.
12.08.2012
Michele
I am looking forward to when you get the save as a template option completed. I have liked using the new editor. I was just changing the format of my campaigns and decided to try it out.
12.13.2012
Rachel
Hi Jason,
I have a template created for a campaign design, which I got through the “replicate” link of an old campaign. It appears that in the “design” step I would be able to click “Save to My Templates,” but I cannot find this button. Is this the same problem? Is there a way to save this into “My Templates”?
05.15.2013
Jason
Hey Rachel, Campaigns created with the drag and drop editor and campaigns/templates created with the old editor are very different. If there’s no Save to My Templates link then you’re probably in drag and drop campaign. If you wanted to reuse the design you created in that campaign, just go to the layout tab of the design step, and look for it under “My Campaigns”. If it’s a design you plan to use often, click the heart icon next to it and it’ll create a new section called “Favorites”.
05.15.2013
Rachel
Thanks!
05.16.2013
Natasha
I’m loving the drag and drop. Trying to figure out how to do the video clip trick but maybe I’m missing something obvious…can you put html in the boxes? I’m not seeing how. A quick tip would be appreciated!
Thanks.
12.10.2012
Jason
You can edit the HTML in any of the text blocks by clicking the “< >” button in the toolbar on the editor. Once you’re in code view, you can use our video merge tags to insert a link to an online video. Note: The video merge tags have a set width so they may prevent your campaign layout from adjusting for mobile. We’re working on a fix for that.
12.10.2012
Natasha
Got it- thanks!
12.10.2012
Joel
I had been looking feverishly for the right newsletter management system. I thought I might have to spend a fortune on a software to download and maintain. I then, by the draw of luck, came across MailChimp. It’s a dream come true! Simple to use UI, nothing to download, customizable to the finest detail and, best of all, is free for new small websites who are just getting started. I will surely upgrade as my business needs dictate! Even after I upgrade I have no problem with the MailChimp logo appearing in my email campaigns as I am more than happy to pass this on! Thank you for this! I would add on a final note, I sincerely hope the ability to save the drag and drop templates is soon to come. :-)
12.12.2012
Jason
Thanks Joel! That’s our highest priority for the next release. In the mean time, you can reuse a design you’ve already created with the new editor by hovering over the email’s name on the campaigns page and clicking “replicate”. Hope that helps for now.
12.12.2012
Joel
Thank you Jason for the reply. Thank you also for the resources page. I really had no idea what to make of the numbers in the reports generated. I was actually shocked at the stats you discovered. I would have thought they would have been much higher. Is there one particular thing you would attribute the low open rates to? Thanks again. :-)
12.14.2012
Jason
Open and click rates vary a lot from industry to industry and list to list. There’s a lot of things that can affect them too. Something as simple as adjusting your subject line or send time can make a difference. There’s a few more tips and links in this knowledge base article: http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/how-do-i-improve-my-open-or-click-rate
12.15.2012
Rubén
It’s incredible, always thinking in investing new features, thanks
12.12.2012
Tammy
Love the drag and drop so far, it’s super convenient. It’d be perfect if it had the 1:2 columns w/left sidebar template ;)
12.12.2012
Frances Proctor
I really like the drag and drop editor but one thing that would be nice would be to be able to upload a small seamlessly repeating image to set as a tiling background.
12.12.2012
Jason
I wish we could, Frances. Unfortunately, background images are unsupported in several email clients (Outlook included) so that’s why we don’t have any place in the app to add them.
12.13.2012
Kelly Taylor
I love the drag & drop templates. I just found the new social blocks. They are great — but it doesn’t include facebook comments. It would be great if facebook comments/share were an option in the Social Share block.
12.13.2012
Jason
Hey Kelly, because these actions get included in the actual email content, JavaScript is not available. Without JavaScript, I believe the only thing we can do is allow you to share a URL. I’ll double check that though.
12.13.2012
Paul lovell
Hi This is a great addition to a already great service been using this alot and the drag and drop for importing images is just great
12.13.2012
mexiaPR
Love the new features, but not displaying properly in Outlook 2010 which is a bit of a shame! Any pointers welcome..
12.14.2012
Jason
We’re currently working on a fix for a stubborn Outlook bug that causes the columns in the 2 column and sidebar templates (with content that is at least 1,700 pixels long) to stack. This affects all multi-column templates that convert to single-column in mobile – not just in our new editor but in our older mobile templates and similar templates from other ESPs as well. Is that the display issue you’re seeing?
12.14.2012
Robert
I’m not sure if it’s what mexiaPR is seeing, but that describes what I’m seeing. The two column section is stacking rather than displaying side-by-side and the image caption blocks with the caption to the right or left are much wider than they’re supposed to be, which ends up making the whole thing look ridiculous. Here’s a couple screenshots to show you what I mean (this is in Outlook 2007).
Multi columns stacking: http://d.pr/i/qp5e
Images with left/right captions: http://d.pr/i/h8CM
Any suggestion for getting this fixed on a case-by-case basis right now?
12.14.2012
Jason
Unfortunately, there’s no easy fix for this. The current method of coding multi-column, responsive email templates is to use 2 separate tables – one aligned right and one aligned left. That works great in all email clients (even Outlook) until your email hits 23.7in or about 1,790px. That’s when Outlook inserts an unwanted, very destructive page break. In most HTML email templates, the page break just causes a gap and maybe a line of missing background color. In responsive, mobile templates though, it causes those aligned tables to stack.
We’re experimenting with new methods of coding multi-column, responsive email templates but we’ve got a lot more testing to do. In the mean time, if you have content that is longer than a couple pages and you want to use the drag and drop editor, I’d recommend selecting the single column (basic) template. You can achieve a similar look to the designs in your screenshots by using layers of text or image caption blocks set to 2 columns (on the settings tab). If a 2 column block happens to fall on that 1,790px line, the 2 columns may stack but it’ll only affect 1 block and not the whole layout.
12.14.2012
Daniel
Hi Jason,
Great work on the drag & drop editor updates… fantastic!
Any progress on this issue? Is it likely to be a quick(ish) fix or is there a lot more testing required? :)
Cheers,
Daniel.
01.02.2013
Jason
We’re actively testing possible solutions but don’t have an ETA yet. We’ve had some success but every solution tends to cause other issues. As one of our devs said this morning, we want to make sure the cure isn’t worse than the disease.
01.02.2013
Katie B
Hi, I’m having massive issues with how the email comes through in outlook as it takes the right hand side images and stacks them under the email!!! Even if I reduce the image size and stick to the 1790px the email is still distorted in outlook and when you forward it on from outlook.
When I try a different template and reduce the size of the images, the quality really suffers.
I’m a bit disappointed that this is happening especially as mailchimp has such great reviews but the majority of our recipients will be using outlook – so does this mean we have to use a different email service?
02.13.2013
Jason
Hey there! We actually have a fix for the 2 column drag and drop editor templates that will roll out with the v8.0 release next week. If your campaign is shorter than 1,790px and the columns are still stacking, it’s possible that something within a column is forcing the width out. Did you add your images via one of the image blocks, or from within the text editor?
02.13.2013
Harvey M.
As a long time Aweber user, I must say the UI looks very attractive.
12.15.2012
grace4nations
WOW!!!!!! This is a great upgrade to your editing system, I’m sure you have much more that you want to do but this is great.
congrats,
12.18.2012
Ted Pendlebury
I think I’m not finding the right place to register “issues” with the new editor. First, I LOVE it. The layouts are great – attractive, and easy to use. The problem I’m having is with the left sidebar layout. Anytime I’ve seen the email in Outlook 2010, it breaks it up as if there’s not enough horizontal room, in preview and in open viewing. So you get one column, then scroll down to see the other column. Not good. Can you give me a tip on how to fix this?
12.18.2012
Ted Pendlebury
Never mind… I’m now reading some previous posts, and you’ve already answered my question. Thanks much. Great product, by the way!
12.18.2012
tommy wilde
very spiffy. would like to see the ability to add a top/bottom margin around an image when fill edge to edge is selected
12.19.2012
tommy wilde
or at least give us a way to modify HTML after the chimp does his work
12.19.2012
Jason
Because of the nature of blocks and the fragility of the mobile-friendly markup, we probably won’t be able to allow HTML modification outside of what you can do within the source mode in the text editors. We do want to make blocks as flexible as possible though and are considering ways to adjust top/bottom spacing. In the mean time, a spacer block would give you finer control over the gap between edge-to-edge images and other blocks. In the settings you can remove the border and adjust the padding to insert any size space you need.
12.20.2012
Rang
What about other blocks (text, text border… – I want remove padding but I don’t see in this setting)?
03.21.2013
Jason
There isn’t currently a way to remove the padding from a text or boxed text block but we’re already planning to resolve that. Probably by adding an “Edge to Edge” checkbox under settings like images have.
03.22.2013
Siobhan
Hey guys, just trying out the new drag and drop for our next newsletter and really loving all the features, great work! Much easier to use and create a better looking email. Just one query, in the social follow section, will you be adding a Youtube icon/link? Thanks!
01.09.2013
Jason
Glad you’re enjoying it so far. We’ve seen a few requests to add YouTube to the Social Follow block options. Adding it to our to do list!
01.10.2013
Kim
Glad to see these changes — it’s much easier to create campaigns. I can’t figure out how to change the background color for the whole thing, just individual boxes. Can you give me some direction on how to do that?
01.10.2013
John
Hi Kim, Right above the area where you see the drag and drop elements you’ll see a bar for Layout, Content, and Design. Just click design, then page, and under background style you can change the background color.
01.10.2013
Siobhan
Awesome thanks!
01.11.2013
Tyson Cecka
+1 for Youtube, thanks guys!
01.30.2013
Jan
Love the drag and drop options. Also, really like the Social Follow block. Will you guys be adding a Blog link button? I saw that you had a blog button in a previous set-up I tried (maybe the older editor?), but not with the cool, new Social Follow section. Hope you guys can add one. Thanks!
05.21.2013
John
Hi Jan, I think we might already have what your looking for. If you take a peek at the social follow buttons you’ll see an option there for “Website.” You can of course add a link to your blog and change the name of the button to Blog or whatever works for your particular situation.
05.22.2013
Peter Curtis
Jason,
How come there’s no content block for preheaders? When I drop a text block in the preheader space, it messes up the formatting. I’ve submitted support ticket LTK1212502433062X about this issue.
01.12.2013
John
Hi Peter, There’s some default formatting for the pre-header area. If you go to the design tab, you’ll see an option for PreHeader and that’s where you can change those default styles which should clear up your issue.
01.17.2013
Jason
John’s right and the reason we didn’t add a “preheader” block was because preheader text can be added with a normal text block, split into columns. We’re trying not to add new block types unless they’re really necessary.
01.17.2013
Joe
I seem to have issues with the preheader block rendering over two lines in Outlook 2007 (and probably 2010, 2013, etc). No matter how long the text is on either column I always get the right hand column one line below the left column’s content. Any ideas on how to remedy that?
01.21.2013
John
Hi Joe, It sounds like something might actually be pushing out somewhere else causing that “stack/wrap” type thing, but it’s hard to know for sure without looking specifically at the campaign. Would you mind contacting our support chimps at: http://mailchimp.com/support so they can take a closer look?
01.22.2013
Steve Nelson
Chimps, the new template tools seem to be working great. Love the ability to quickly duplicate blocks and drag them around. Only issue that I see right now is that if you use the sidebar template, the sidebar layout stacks, but remains very narrow (does not expand to “100%” width) on mobile. Not sure if I’m missing something, or if that is working as you intended.
01.23.2013
Scott
Nice! Easy! Robust! Flexible! Predictable!
One thing though – Copy/Paste blocks from one design to the other (also submitted in the feedback area). Anyone else need to copy things from one design to another? I’d like a Clipboard.
01.24.2013
Virginia Ripple
I used the Drag & Drop with my first campaign and loved it, but now I can’t get it to work at all. I’ve searched the help menus and even googled the problem to see if anyone else has experienced it. I tried setting up a second user to see if that worked, but still nothing. I can get to the design portion, but, when given a choice of templates, the whole thing stops working. I can click on either template choice and nothing happens. I copied an old campaign, thinking I could just move things around on the copy, but I can neither add new blocks nor move existing ones. I also cannot delete blocks or duplicate them. All I can do is edit existing blocks. I would appreciate some help with this because I loved the freedom of the Drag & Drop.
03.01.2013
John
Hi Virginia, It sounds like something might be amiss in your cache or stored cookies. I’d go ahead and clear both of those items out, this article: http://eepurl.com/mjFv will show you how if you’re not familiar, and give it a go again. Another cause for odd behavior could be settings or plugins in a browser so you might also try accessing it from a different one. All that being said, if it’s just not behaving properly, our support chimps over at: http://mailchimp.com/chat could get a few more details to help you sort things out.
03.01.2013
Denise
Brilliant!
Just one request and one Q.
Request: May want to use the boxed text as a divider with text, but would prefer if there were more (not so tall) height options. Right now the smallest is a bit clunky.
Q: WHEN are we likely to to see the SAVE as Template feature working. Won’t hold you to it, but a general ETA would be very helpful for our planning.
03.08.2013
John
Hi Denise, Thanks for the feedback, but I’m not sure I understand completely. If you have a moment, it’d be great if you could explain in a little more detail here: http://kb.mailchimp.com/support/feedback/ As for “Save As” I don’t have an ETA for you, but in case you missed it, in our v7.9 release we added “My Campaigns” and “Favorites” that’ll allow you to basically save and reuse campaigns very similarly to how you’d start with a template.
03.11.2013
Jon_Mills
Need to seriously be an option to adjust DIV and height and width in drag and drop editor my designer said he couldn’t do it. We are using RIGHT CAPTION ( image on left, text on right )
I was told
mpaigns generated in the Drag and Drop editor would not be an option. To have more control over the width of the image in comparison to the caption, you could try using a Text area instead, and inserting an HTML table there :) Or setting it up to be “2 column” by selecting the “settings” option
it’s not an option to directly edit the div codes that determine the width of content areas with the Drag and Drop editor
03.13.2013
Jason
Hello Jon, It’s hard to understand what you’re asking without seeing the design you were trying to implement. Is there a certain specific width you want as an option on the image + caption settings? While you can’t edit the HTML and CSS that controls the widths of image+caption blocks, you can (as I think you were suggesting) write custom HTML into any text block, including the one in the image + caption. You could also write some custom HTML to create a table and add an image to a standard text block.
03.14.2013
Regan Lambert
I really like the new drag and drop editor! I agree that the ability to save to a template is greatly needed. I also wish that we could adjust the spacing between blocks. For some reason, social links are centered vertically and yet, buttons made, are not.
Overall, love it!
Thanks,
Regan
03.25.2013
John
Hi Regan, In case you hadn’t spotted it, we did add “My Campaigns” and “Favorites” to the Drag and Drop editor in v7.9 so you can use your favorite campaigns as starting points for new campaigns. It’ll get you much closer to the feel of having Templates ready to go when creating new campaigns. Thanks for the feedback on the buttons, I’ll be sure to pass that along to our UX team.
03.25.2013
Rang VU
how can I change width slidebar in drag and drop editor?
Ex: I have newsletter width 600px but in my design: slidebar width 250px and body width 350px. How can I change width sidebar = 250px when I use drag and drop editor?
03.27.2013
John
Adjusting the width of the columns in the Drag and Drop editor isn’t currently available, but we’re always looking for ways to improve so stay tuned to the blog. In the meantime, rather than coding your own template from scratch you could use one of the pre-existing templates with a side column as a starting point and make your changes there. If you’re not entirely sure of the steps in that process you can reach our support chimps at: http://mailchimp.com/chat and they’ll be happy to get you going in the right direction.
03.28.2013
tim
Nice changes. Much easier except I am used to saving stuff in ‘my templates’ so I am having to duplicate all the time. Loving the mobile phone formats. Well done!
03.31.2013
Amanda M
I’m not sure if it’s just a bug, but if you start with the drag-and-drop, and then have to save it before sending it out, when you go back in to edit it, none of the content placed is saved. If fully defaults back to the filler text of the templates.
04.07.2013
John
Hmmmmm, that doesn’t sound right at all. Not sure what might be causing that, but if you wouldn’t mind reaching out to our support chimps at: http://mailchimp.com/chat they’d be happy to take a look and help sort this out for you.
04.08.2013
Braan
Hi,
I’m trying the new editor, like it, but I don’t find a way to translate “Forward to friend” in the Social share block. Is it possible ?
Thanks
04.15.2013
John
Hi Braan, It’s not something you can currently do, but in the meantime you could add a button and set the text to “Forward to a Friend” in your language of choice. Once you’ve done that, you’d just need to add the *|FORWARD|* merge tag in the link area and you should be all set.
04.16.2013
Vicky Hammond
Created my own design today and I love this new tool! I chose to maintain the 600 pixel width and want to add a contrasting border to make our campaign. However, the border default set up allows for a very wide campaign. Is there a way to adjust the size of the canvas? THANK YOU!
04.16.2013
John
Hi Vicky, I’m not entirely sure I understand, but if you haven’t already found this setting, you can change the border around your email by going to the Design Tab –> Page –> Email Border where you can choose the size of the border you wish in pixels, the color, and even the style of the border. If you need a little extra explanation, or if I’ve missed the mark completely, our support chimps are also available to help at: http://mailchimp.com/chat
04.16.2013
Haizea
Hi! Please, can you tell us something about dates? We need the option “save as a template” with the fantastic drag&drop editor.
Thanks in advance!
04.23.2013
John
I’m sorry I don’t have an ETA for “save as a template” yet, but in case you missed it, our v7.9 release had some features that might help. Basically, you now have an option of “My Campaigns” and “Favorites” when selecting a template for a new campaign you could choose a prior campaign and mark it as a favorite. In the future you can just select that “Favorite” as your starting point for a new campaign.
04.23.2013
Naomi
The new editor is much easier to use but there are still a few things that are a bit frustrating. The problem I’m having at the moment is trying to fit type to a certain width. I have a separate text box and I want the type to fit the width of it. I have tried adjusting the type size in the ‘Content’ window but you can only choose the sizes available. I have also tried adjusting the type size in ‘Style”, where it says font size. This only adjusts the space above and below the line of type, not the type size!
04.30.2013
Jason
Hey Naomi, once you’ve changed the font-size from within the content tab, that style is added “inline” to the text you selected and will not be overridden by block changes made in the style tab. If you’d like your text to use the size defined on the style tab, select your text in the editor and click the “clear styles” button to remove inline changes to your text. It’s a little confusing but it’s the way CSS works and has some benefits too. You can, for instance, set the block’s font-size to one default size but then have a few lines of text within your block that are a different size. Hope that helps!
05.01.2013
Naomi
Thank you for the reply. I have cleared the styles and then gone into the style tab to select a font size but can only choose from the sizes that are given. 18px is not quite big enough and the next size 20px is too big and drops the last word to the next line. I really wanted to have a single line of text that is the same width as the text box.
05.01.2013
Jason
I would advise against trying to get a single line of text to perfectly fill a container for a couple reasons. First, emails created in the new editor are responsive and scale down in modern browsers. Also, different email clients, operating systems and devices all render text slightly differently which may end up causing your last word to drop to a new line. If it’s multiple lines of text, you could try using the justify setting in the editor (between the right align and spellcheck buttons) but keep in mind that justified text can get ugly in narrow columns.
05.02.2013
Naomi
I have another query. I would like to have photos evenly spaced with less gutter width between the images. Dragging in an image group keeps them at the same size and spacing and I can’t seem to change the picture box size. When I look at the inspiration examples, there are many varied layouts showing many photos and even, narrow spacing. Also how can I place more than 2 pictures next to each other?
05.01.2013
Jason
While we’d like to eventually allow you to change the gutter width on image blocks, there’s currently no way to do this. We originally planned to have image layout options with rows of up to 4 images but we ran into rendering issues with older email clients (namely, Outlook) that prevented us from going over 2. I’ve seen some designs at http://inspiration.mailchimp.com/ that use a single image that a their grid of photos but that only allows you to have a single link for the entire grid. Another option, if you have some HTML know-how is to code your own image grid and paste it into the source view of a normal text block.
05.02.2013
Michael Torbert
I love the drag and drop editor, and am looking forward to being able to save it as a template!
05.01.2013
Michael Torbert
Although interestingly, it appears as though you can just select from a previous campaign to start with, including when making an autoresponder. Unless I’m missing something, that’s just as good.
05.01.2013
Jette
No matter how many times I change the size of my pictures in Photoshop, they always show up too big in Outlook 2010. Any idea why this happens? I created them as 600px, then downscaled to 560px but not matter what I do, they look silly in the e-mail.
05.14.2013
John
Hi Jette, Hrrrmmmm… That sounds a bit odd, but I’m not sure I can sort that out without taking a closer look. Would you mind chatting or emailing the support chimps at: http://mailchimp.com/chat so they can dig in and see what they find?
05.14.2013
Yves Stroobants
Hello Michael,
Do you know how to save as a template? Or do we have to wait?
Thx
Yves
05.21.2013
John
Hi Yves, There’s no “save as a template” quite yet, but in release 7.9 we added the ability to re-use old campaigns and even favorite specific campaigns for re-use on future campaigns. While it’s not identical to a template, it’s a great way to have a good starting place for your future emails.
05.21.2013
Yves Stroobants
Ok John,
Thanks for a quick reply. But I want to export a template and use it in a new account on mailchimp. And the problem is that I can’t export a template because I can’t save it as “my template” in the first place…
Any suggestions?
Thanks !
Yves
05.21.2013
John
Hi Yves, I’m sorry, but for now you’ll need to just recreate the campaign in the new account if you’re using the drag and drop editor.
05.23.2013