Are there any features for developing HTML emails locally and using version control

emailemail-templatehtmlmarketing-cloudversion-control

So far my work with Salesforce is for HTML emails in Content Builder. I don't see any obvious features that would allow our team to do various things that would help streamline development, such as:

Version control for (master) templates and components (reference content)
Develop and test locally, outside Content Builder and the browser
Deployment using version control
CSS inlining, minification, and other common features for email dev

It could be my access level, the features may exist, but searching around on the interwebs, I don't see any obvious leads so far to do with this.

The most immediate need for us is so we can document/comment our master templates. Since it seems there are limits in certain email clients, such as:

The total number of lines allowed
The total number of characters allowed
The cumulative size of the CSS

…we need a way to comment our code that doesn't interfere with these limits, which would mean stripping out the comments automatically for deployment (but retaining them in source).

But we also would benefit from minification and other features, which aren't in the web app (that I can tell), but always available locally.

Best Answer

I consulted with a support representative of the Salesforce team, and they informed me that (as of March 2022) these features do not yet exist, as I suspected. They said they could become available features "in the near future", which would be great.

Fingers crossed. After all, Salesforce does recognize the importance of version control.

I will update this answer when the situation changes.

Related Solutions

[SalesForce] Using APEX to assemble HTML Letterhead Emails

Salesforce hacking time: I had this exact requirement, and was stuck for a while because of the weird connection between EmailTemplate and BrandTemplate, and the inability to leverage a merging/parsing function however, I found a solution, this is far from a clean solution, but it seems to be working perfectly.

First what you will do is, create a single email message (like you would send it from apex):

// Here we will build the single email message
Messaging.reserveSingleEmailCapacity(1);
Messaging.SingleEmailMessage mail = new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage();
String[] toAddresses = new String[]{'invalid@emailaddr.es'};
mail.setToAddresses(toAddresses);
mail.setUseSignature(false);
mail.setSaveAsActivity(false);
mail.setSenderDisplayName('MMPT');
mail.setTargetObjectId(UserInfo.getUserId());
mail.setTemplateId(sendTemplate.Id);

What we will do next is trick salesforce in sending the single email message, by setting a savepoint, sending the message and rolling back. The single email will not be send because of the rollback.

Savepoint sp = Database.setSavepoint();
Messaging.sendEmail(new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage[] {mail});
Database.rollback(sp);

But now the beauty comes, because we triggered the sendEmail method, the email template got merged with the brandtemplate and the parsing took place. And you can find the parsed versions of your template components in the next variables (Subject, Text and HTML)

String mailTextBody = mail.getPlainTextBody();
String mailHtmlBody = mail.getHTMLBody();
String mailSubject = mail.getSubject();

This is far from what salesforce meant to do with single email message, and since we cannot leverage the platform parsing and merging functions, this did gave me a solution to this problem unfortunately through some hacking.

[SalesForce] HTML Email Status for mass emails

You need to configure the appropriate filters to match your mass email and then run the 'HTML Email Status' report. Apply filters to categorize your mass emails hierarchically using multiple criteria - e.g. by date first, and then email template name. Filters should be applied so that they only match your mass email campaign and NOT other emails.

For e.g. If you'd like to know the status of mass emails sent out on Christmas day, you would run the report then filter by that date (25th December 2013) and then by email template name used in the mass mail campaign. The important thing here to note is that the report does not know those filters our specific to mass email.

I had faced the same issue some time back and this thread with the above mentioned approached helped me.

Related Topic

[SalesForce] Flows/Processes, Version Control and CI