Email Campaign
I'm new to Sitefinity, using a trial version of Sitefinity 5 to prototype a newsletter-style email campaign for a client. Following Sitefinity's documentation, I've created an email list, configured SMTP settings, and attempted to create a message template using the 'like a web page' option.
In the template builder displayed, I select a 75% - 25% layout element and drag it to the design surface. Fine. Switching to content, I drag any widget into either of the layout boxes, but they refuse to be deployed. Must I select a template first? Okay, so I select the Right Sidebar, Header, Footer pre-defined template, then attempt to drag a blog widget into that template, which also fails. No widget accepts insertion into a template layout pane, but will successfully drop into their interstices. However,I don't want them to do that as they stretch across the entire page. I want the blog widget confined to 75% of the message template width so I can place the news widget in a right side column, confined to the 25% width pane.
I separately created a page template in the format that I need and successfully dragged blog, news and content widgets onto the template. All content looked right (particularly blogs that contained images and video links). After saving this, I went back to the email campaign tools, created a new campaign and added the previously saved page tempate to the campaign message design surface. All of the blog images appeared as broken links in the preview; video thumbnails appeared to load but would not play.
When I returned to the email campaign and sent myself a test message using this template, images in blog posts did arrive, although without the CSS styling seen in the template, but videos appeared as a black box with a red 'X' inside. Not exactly what I was looking for.
What's the right way to proceed with this? Thanks in advance for your advice.
Todd
I am also a new user building a 5.0.2860 project. I am having similar difficulty with the newsletter template designer. In a nutshell the emails I send out are rendering poorly in Outlook and in gmail. The end result is very different than the template I create using Sitefinity's layout engine and widgets. I would appreciate information on any known issues with the newsletter templates.
Can you wait until next week (hopfully)?
They've totally reworked the email campaigns module
http://www.sitefinity.com/blogs/hristoborisov/posts/12-05-16/sneak_preview_email_campaigns_in_sitefinity_5_1.aspx