resin-emails v2.22.1

Balena newsletter generator

The purpose of this tool is to help with the creation of balena newsletters and other marketing emails. It uses templating principles and a responsive email framework to convert simple HTML tags into the complex table HTML required for emails, so you don't have thousands of tables in your markup. The main technologies used are:

• Handlebars semantic HTML templates
• MJML responsive email framework
• Browsersync Built-in synchronised server for testing
• Mailchimp integration

Features

• Generates the email as a responsive HTML file.
• Mailchimp integration
  • Creates a Mailchimp campaign
  • Adds the HTML email to the campaign
  • Sends test email (will not be sent to audience, only specified tester)

Installation

You will need Node.js 8 or greater.

git pull https://github.com/balena-io/balena-emails
cd balena-emails
npm install

Usage

To use the tool you will need to:

• specify which email template to use (see the templates section)
• provide a JSON file with the template content (see the datafile section)

Watch

If you want to develop a new template, edit an existing one or just see how the template looks like:

npm run watch -- --datafile path/to/datafile.json --template <newsletter>

All files except the .json datafile are watched so you will see the changes imediately on your browser. If you modify the datafile you will need to re-run this command.

Build

If you just want to generate the responsive email run this command. The generated output can be located on the dist folder:

npm run build -- --datafile path/to/datafile.json --template <newsletter>

Staging

If you want to generate the responsive email and publish the result to a netlify webpage you can run:

npm run staging -- --datafile path/to/datafile.json --template <newsletter> --netlifytoken <NETLIFY_AUTH_TOKEN>

Here is how you can get your Netlify token.

Publish

If you want to generate the responsive email, publish to netlify, create the mailchimp campaign and send a test email (this will not send the campaign to the end users):

npm run publish -- --datafile path/to/datafile.json --template <newsletter> --netlifytoken <NETLIFY_AUTH_TOKEN> --mailchimpkey <YOUR_MAILCHIMP_API_KEY>

Here is how you can get your Mailchimp API_KEY.

Templates

This are the templates currently available:

• newsletter

Datafile format

The datafile must be a JSON file with the following parameters (there is also a sample file in the data folder). Parameters in bold are required.

Global configuration

Template: Newsletter settings