Finally, after a lot of hard work - the beta of Newsletter Studio 3 for Umbraco 8 is out!
The new version is a total rewrite for Umbraco 8, we have tried to be smart about this so that we can make the move to Umbraco vNext (based on .NET 5).
The beta version should be fully functional, almost all features from version 2 is included along with a lot of new and existing features. It would take hours to go through all of them, but this is a brief summery of the most important news.
The old "Rich Text Editor" used to create emails in version 2 is long gone and replaced with an editor that makes it super easy to create responsive emails with high resolution images that renders nice in all desktop and mobile clients.
The editor is configurable with custom themes that controls default colors, fonts, sizes etc. It's also possible to extend many parts of the editor ie. adding custom Email Controls (like Image, Text, Button) and create "Merge Field Providers" that lists valid Fields for the editor to insert.
The rendering of the email is done using razor templates, one "main template" for the rows and columns and one template for each Control, all of these can be customized in a custom theme if needed.
The new email editor
Preview-feature for both desktop and mobile
While this is not included in beta the addition of transactional email will be a huge improvement for the package. Developers can create C# models with property attributes that makes it possible to show the class-properties and options as Fields inside the email editor. The possibilities with this are endless but most obvious examples is welcome emails, forgot password emails, signup confirmations etc.
The new version is built around a optional multi-tenant foundation. Each installation will have at least one "Workspace". Each Workspace is an independent "entity" that has it's own recipients, mailing lists, themes and settings. Workspaces comes with granular permissions that can be mapped to User Groups or individual Users.
Using multiple Workspaces comes with additional charges for the license, see the pricing page for details.
SMTP is still the way to send emails but these days there's a lot of great Email API services available. In Newsletter Studio 3 the process of sending the email is abstracted so that it's quite easy to implement an "Email Service Provider" that can talk to what ever API we want ie. Mandrill, SendGrid, MailJet or MailGun. This make it possible to skip the slow SMTP-protocol and send via API if wanted.
A fundamental changed in v3 compared to v2 is that each Workspace only stores a Recipient once and creates relations between a Mailing List and the Recipient. This makes it possible to create a nice view with details about each Recipient.
The Beta is out in the wild and you're most welcome to try it out - there is two ways to get started. The package runs on all versions of Umbraco 8 from 8.0.0 to the latest. There might be small visual differences between versions as Umbraco changes CSS from time to time - if you find any strange looking things just let us know.
We've made the package available on NuGet, at the moment when the package is in beta one need to enable "Prerelease" packages to see it.
Install-Package NewsletterStudio -PreRelease
https://www.nuget.org/packages/NewsletterStudio/
There is also a Umbraco Package that can be installed via the Backoffice of Umbraco, just go to our page on our.umbraco.org to download the package.
There is still a backlog of work that needs to be done before the RC and the final release will be out. Here is a list, not at all complete, of things that we know as of now:
We'll add to this list as we find out more things that we need to address, please feel free to reach out with questions and feedback to info@newsletterstudio.org.
Beta 8 - Released 2021-08-07
Just a patch-fix release for Beta7, fixes some minor issues.
Beta 7 - Released 2021-08-06
A bigger release with the added support for Transactional e-emails to send emails from your system ie. "Welcome" emails and "Forgot Password" e-mails. All these can now be designed by editors in the backoffice. This feature can also be used in conjuction with ie. Umbraco Forms to send nicely designed email from the Forms. There is two videos to watch, the beta7 walkthrough and the UmbraCoffe-presentation.
Upgrading: Upgrade via NuGet or by uploading Umbraco Package. One might have to reset browser cache to refresh client files (js/css/html). Also might need to bump the "version" in /config/clientDependency.config to reset the backoffice client files cache.
Summery:
Beta 6 - Released 2021-05-14
More polish, improvments and and bug fixes
Upgrading: Upgrade via NuGet or by uploading Umbraco Package. One might have to reset browser cache to refresh client files (js/css/html).
Summary:
Beta 5 - Released 2021-04-24
Polish and fixes some issues related to newer Umbraco-versions.
Upgrading: Upgrade via NuGet or by uploading Umbraco Package. One might have to reset browser cache to refresh client files (js/css/html).
Summary:
Beta 4 - Released 2021-04-11
Critical fix for sentDate for email tracking items, fixes some known issues and bugs found during beta testing.
Upgrading: Upgrade via NuGet or by uploading Umbraco Package. One might have to reset browser cache to refresh client files (js/css/html).
Summary: