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Emails don't have to suck now

What up my glipglops, no more shit-tier email development for you.

How to use

  • Clone this repo with git clone
  • Run npm install in the folder to get everything ready to go
  • npm start will get you going with development, with live reload and SASS sourcemaps
  • Run npm run build when you're ready to compile for production

Inky

Inky is a templating language for emails. It uses Foundation as it's grid system, but compiles everything to email-friendly HTML tables and such. The syntax is real straightforward.

I put a bunch of example code in the examples.html file, but none of it looks nice. Maybe later. Here's some stuff to know:

  • Use the <spacer> element to create vertical spacing instead of padding or margins, it will be way more consistent
  • Wrapping things in <center> will center your stuff real nice
  • <menu> and <item> are better to use than <ul> and <li> apparently, I would use it since it basically just builds your lists out as tables

For our purposes, everything you'll need is likely in the examples file.

Panini

This setup also uses Panini, which you might have used before. It lets you add variables to the top of your page, and that data is then passed to either the page itself or the template you're using at compile time. This is also how you tell the email what template it should be using, which are created in the 'layouts' folder. There's one in there already that you'll probably never really need to touch.

Add something like this to the top of your page template:

---
layout: default
subject: This is the email subject, dingus
description: This is a description or something probably
---

And it would get added to this in the layout you selected:

<head>
<title>{{ subject }}</title>
</head>
<h1>{{ description }}</h1>

Some things to keep in mind

All your CSS will be inlined at production, which means a couple of things:

  • Do not use !important on anything other than media queries. That being said, make sure EVERY rule in your media queries are important, since they can't be inlined and will instead be shoved into a <style> tag in the header.
  • Once your stuff is compiled for production, ALL your CSS will be inlined (minus queries). If you have any weird styling problems after compiling, this is the first place you should look, as it may behave slightly differently than if you were relying on inheritance and all that fancy stuff normal CSS usually does.
  • As a general rule of thumb, you should avoid using display: block whenever possible, and use display: table instead. Everything will be in tables anyway, so it'll save you headaches if some of the default tags aren't behaving as expected.