Hi folks,
Here’s a question I shared in the partner Slack channel. I’m hoping a broader audience, might produce some ideas.
I have a customer who would like a lot of layout flexibility within email templates and widgets. It's a scenario that would conceptually fit layout widgets, if the Email Marketing module had such a thing.
However, Email Marketing widgets seems to be a completely different animal from other types. They are not based on Web Parts or MVC (of course), so we can’t add a layout widget/web part. They are created using plain text markup and macros inside the Email Marketing module’s Widget Editor. If we try the syntax for HTML layouts (e.g. “{^WebPartZone|(id)zoneA^}”), it doesn’t work. However, this is no surprise. It’s intended for the Portal Engine, not Email Marketing.
We also tried using the zone syntax for Email Marketing templates (e.g. “$$zone3$$”). This works in templates, but if added to an Email Widget, the widget just renders the syntax as text.
So, do any of you know of a custom approach that would allow having an email widget to provide a 2-up or 3-up layout, which would also allow nesting a variety of widgets inside? This would allow us to provide something similar to what the customer is used to in the Bronto email editor:
My gut feeling is no, but it would save us from having to maintain many email template varieties, just to provide a variety of layouts.
Thank you,
Mike