Dovetailer Starter

Dovetailer is an email compiler. Write Sass and Nunjucks to generate HTML emails with text versions. Learn more here..

This repo is meant to be forked. Use it as a starter, and hack away :)

Requirements

• Node 8+

Quick Start

npm install
npm start

HTTP API

This repo also comes with an HTTP API. Run node service to start the API service on port 3000. There's one endpoint, email.

Example:

POST http://localhost:3000/email
Body {
  "name": "welcome",
	"context": {
    "header": "Hello there,"
  }
}

This repo also includes a Dockerfile for this API.

Coding Tips

To prevent as many potential rendering issues as possible, I recommend the following best practices:

• Avoid margin styles, but padding works on <td>s. Refer to the MailChimp or Campaign Monitor CSS guides (linked below under Email Coding) to see whether the styles you're using will work across email clients.
• Never use HTML ids, only use classes.
• Avoid <p>, <span>, or <div> tags
• Also avoid any old-school non-semantic HTML tags like <font> and <center> (use CSS instead)
• Always put alt attributes on <img>s
• <td> tags containing text should always have the font-family style
• In general, keep styles in CSS. A notable exception is align="center", which is a handy way to center align tables or images.
• Get clever with rowspan and colspan!

Project Organization

• build: generated output
• components: reusable template bits
• emails: individual email types
• templates: email templates designed to be inherited

Helpful Resources

Documentation

• Dovetailer Documentation
• Nunjucks
• Sass

Email Coding

• Limitations of HTML Email
• Campaign Monitor CSS Guide
• MailChimp CSS Support