In our recent v4.3 upgrade, we started to replace all these little template thumbnails in the app:
with actual screenshots of your templates:
It’s a minor change, but it makes a major difference. Note that we’re not cropping them, so if you have an extreeeeemely long template, you’ll get an extreeemely long thumbnail. It’s something we’re still tinkering with, and could use some feedback on. Read more if you’re interested in how we’re doing this…
The process of generating screenshots actually started 3 days ago, and has not completed. So some of you will see the change, and some won’t. We’re using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to generate the screenshots.
They were initially running at 3 screenshots per minute, because we were only using 1 EC2 server for this. We’ve since spooled up a few more servers (5 total now), and we’re processing about 23 screenshots per minute. We anticipate all accounts will be updated sometime next week.
Interesting sidenote: Amazon’s EC2 is amazingly cheap and useful, but we’re spending thousands of dollars per month experimenting with it (and other Amazon services) in the MailChimp Lab. So when our accountant got our first credit card bill with all these charges from “AMAZON” she asked me, “So um, exactly how many books are you buying from Amazon?”
Vielen Dank! Great job. That is exactly what I was talking about few days ago…
Will there be an option added in future releases for editing a template? For example if a client has a MailChimp template designed and uploaded to the template page users should be able to create a new campaign, select use this template for whichever template they’d like to use and then be able to edit the template text in the next screen. Is there a workaround for this?
Lovely little feature, thanks MailChimp.
One little problem, Thumbnails are usually generated just fine, occasionally though they’re not generated at all.
I wonder what might prevent a thumbnail from being generated?
…well now that’s a funny thing. I’ve been seeing the default thumbnail for well over a week now for a particular template. So I post a comment here and the very next time I look at my templates – a proper little thumbnail has appeared! Magic? Coincidence?
Asa, I think your comment had just enough “roughage” in it to unclog whatever intertube out there that was kinked and holding on to your thumbnail.
Auto template thumbnails do not seem to be working for me “at all” on 4 different client accounts where I create and load templates.
Further, it would be highly beneficial if you just let us designers have a way to specify our templates thumbnail within the template language itself.
Generating the templates is a process that runs once a day or something. It’s not instantaneous. If you’ve been waiting a while, and it still hasn’t shown up, I can ask if we’ve turned the process off temporarily. It’s possible our team has turned off as many non-critical processes as possible during the peak holiday season, just to keep everything as speedy as can be.
I just found a way to trigger thumbnail generation. After coding the template and getting it all working in MailChimp, in My Templates, click on the template’s Edit button, and then save. In a couple of seconds/minutes a new thumbnail will be there. Currently however all of my new thumbnails have the bottom half all blacked out.