Big Changes coming to Affino Newsletters

We’ve made some pretty big decisions with Newsletters in Affino today which are going to impact all customers who use Affino for generating their newsletters. Here’s a quick heads up on what will be changing since everyone using Affino for newsletters will have to re-design their newsletter Skins.

 

Since the beginning Affino has always rendered all the design elements for any page design within a newsletter. This worked really well at the outset, but increasingly is not a viable option for three key reasons:

 

1) Email clients are increasingly restricted in what code they will render

 

2) Email clients will not let the email pull in style sheets which means all the styling code has to be incline

 

3) Affino increasingly uses Ajax, JavaScript and Flash for design elements and core functionality, none of these work reliably (if at all) within email clients.

 

It means we’ve taken two big decisions:

 

1) Affino will have two rendering engines for each Design Element, one for newsletters and one the live page / Design Centre.

 

2) We will only allow a small subset of Design Elements within the Newsletter Messages, all others will be escaped.

 

You can see the full list of Newsletter compatible Design Elements below. These will be re-written to present as well as possible when used in newsletters. It’s important to note that none of the TV, eCommerce or Prime Content elements will work in newsletters. It means that in the future newsletter messages can only be created from the subset outlined below.

 

In practice almost all newsletters are already created using only these elements so most users will not have a significant update job in hand. In practice Store and Product highlights are already mostly done using the Detailed Standard Section which will be greatly improved with this release.

 

It also means that users will be getting much better looking, personalised (and error free) messages following the new Newsletter friendly enhancements we’ll be making.

 

Please make sure you’ve prepared your newsletters before updating to 5.5.15.

 

Newsletter Design Elements

 

Only the following will be rendered in Newsletters in the future. All the other design elements will simply be escaped.

 

Community

 

Messge Board Highlights

Blog Highlights

Who’s Online

 

Design

 

Design Object

Design Script

 

eCommerce

 

None

 

Lists

 

Detailed Standard Section

Recommendations

Simple Events Listing (excluding iCal)

 

Media

 

Detailed Media Section

Image

Smart Image & Text

 

Navigation

 

Calendar

 

Prime Content

 

None

 

Promotion

 

Campaign Placement Area

Smart Item

 

Structure

 

Spacer

Text

 

TV

 

None