I cannot tell you how many times I have been asked to develop stacks that make email. I am so thrilled that its finally a reality! Over the years I have tried pretty much every email designer app out there. All of them have been horrible. So about 6 months ago, I finally thought that I would take a crack as making email stacks. I am sure glad that I did…
If you have used my Foundation theme and stacks, you will immediately feel at home with the Email stacks. And if you are new, it will only take you minutes to create your first email.
Email for RapidWeaver is designed to export HTML email that can be used in online newsletter/email services such as MailChimp, MadMimi, AWeber, Sendy, etc. It does not currently support creation of email templates to be used inside Mail.app.
Its powered by Foundation for Emails from my good friends at Zurb. Its a powerful framework that has been tested against all major email clients. It even support responsive layouts! The included demo file has 15 wonderful templates to get you started as well.
This is yet another game changing product for the RapidWeaver community. I hope that these stacks help you make beautiful email just like you do websites. I cannot wait to see what you create!
@TINO Well, it doesn’t work with any theme but the accompanying “Mail” theme. The purpose of this theme-/stacks-combination is to generate HTML-code which is highly compatible to be used with E-Mail services like MailChimp, MadMimi etc. In the end this code is exported from RapidWeaver and being imported in one of these services.
It’s not for sending Emails, it’s for creating the ones you and I get in our inbox from the likes of Audible, Amazon, DesignCuts etc. These type of emails are quite clever things as Email clients (AppleMail, Outlook etc) make use of a very very basic version of HTML and getting anything beyond a ‘Hello World’ type message involves a fair bit of work. For example, there’s no email client out there that supports columns (as we know them) but by making use of what is supported columns can be ‘emulated’
What Joe’s done is create a suite of stacks and corresponding theme that will enable people to create suitable code that can be entered into MailChip, Sendy etc for use in email campaigns.
@joeworkman - Links must be “whole” links then and no “outside” dependencies. (css in in the page code, etc) Soooo… Is there any reason this could not be used to create php include snippets for websites? (since there is no dependencies on outside css, etc) -
RE: PHP INCLUDES
I’m thinking outside the “email” box on this one… What I’m asking about php includes is if your email stacks could generate my html code that my php include calls on my RW pages. The issue is that since I may want to call the html snippet from any page (via an php include) it has to be "self contained, or rather not “page” or “stack” dependent. I hand code my include snippets now and all paths need to be full paths and css has to be inline, etc. I believe a mail snippet would satisfy this need would it not? Since it’s designed for email the css has to be contained in the snippet… right? Would love to try it for this. You don’t have a trial version do you?
RE: TEXT EMAILS
My “text” request comes from the fact that may mail list contains a good number of older folk who still use plain text emails. The nice thing about the email services (I use aWeber) is that they automatically create a text version along with the html. I would LOVE to use RW and your stacks to create emails but I’m afraid that without auto text version generation that’s just not feasible.
Again, thank you for replying to my post. Appreciate it.
I’m going to put this here Mail Designer Pro 3 does everything this stacks do and much much more for $50 bucks
Its layout tools work a lot like Stacks (rows and columns)
Send mails right from the app
Support for GIFs and many other formats
Beautifly designed
Previews for all iOS devices and Apple Watch
Optimized for Gmail apps
it goes without saying but mailchimp is heavily supported
Apple, Google, Tesla and Sony use this software
And the list goes on and on…
I have always been impressed with Joe’s products, and this is not exception I can only try to imagine the amount of work that went in to it i just can’t justify its existence, its like "Turn your dishwasher in to a blender with this easy to install kit, (screws included) All for just $299.99! All the comfort of the dishwasher you already know, and love
This is what Blocs app got right from from the very beginning, it knows its purpose, it doesn’t want to do a thousand things, what it does it does great, in turn you know what the app is meant to do after watching the short intro, and you are up and running in less than 1 hour, this Email stacks just add confusion and investment to RW as I pointed on a different thread ❔What do you want to see in RapidWeaver 8 and beyond?
That is great that you love Mail Designer. I did not.
Email for RapidWeaver…
is the exact layout format as Stacks because it is Stacks. Why learn a new tool?
does not send emails from the app. It does not target that need.
supports GIFs and many other formats
is beautifully Designed (If I say so myself)
can preview for phone, tablet and desktop
is optimized for Gmail and all other email clients.
supports MailChimp as well as any other email service.
is powered by Foundation for Email that is used by major companies around the world. I have already done demos for large corporations and they were blown away. I will be marketing this to marketing departments a lot.
I can keep going on as well…
Thank you for enjoying my other products! You obviously have a solution that works for you with email. So many people including myself were not happy with the email solutions out there. This is why I invested so much time into making this happen.
What you mention as limitations to the RW platform having so many options is also its strongest asset. There are many developers developing amazing products for the community. This gives users options. This is required in a professional tool.
To be fair, Pablo, the other HUGE advantage to Joe’s stacks is that there’s not a huge learning curve. Mail Designer Pro (which I’ve purchased and used) took quite a bit of time to understand and get working right. People familiar with Stacks and Rapidweaver will be able to jump right in and get 'er done.
Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see an answer to Rovertek’s question above: “what about the integration with Apple Mail? Is it planned / worked on / having second thoughts about?”
The announcement says: “It does not currently support creation of email templates to be used inside Mail.app.” Does that mean that the inline html file can’t be used in Mail? Would love to be able to use this for emails to groups that aren’t large enough to warrant paying for an email service (or aren’t for profit).
Any chance there is some way to use this in something like Mail.app, either now or in the future?
Certainly, if you already know how to RapidWeaver your way around that is, but as a fresh example I’ve just finished a platform for a mid sized enterprise a few weeks ago and when we got to the mailing part I’ve had had find imposible to recommend a solution where they need to spend $200 per seat when they could spend $50 for a fully featured professional and dedicated solution.
If you are already invested (intellectually and financially) it makes total sense, but for new comers and corporations I don’t know, I mean it’ll take 1 week tops to train someone to use Mail Designer especially, but thats way more if you need to learn Rapid Weaver, Stacks, and Email, you’d barely know the surface.
I do not have plans to currently to do this. My target market was bulk mail services, not sending one off email with Mail.app. Does this mean that is will never happen? No. Assuming that its technically feasible for me to do this from within the Stack set, it will probably happen eventually.
In terms of not wanting to pay for a mail service, MailChimp’s free account allows up to 2000 emails in your list. I doubt that you are sending to lists that big if you are using Mail.app.
