Using Templates

Creating a Template
Custom Templates
Newsletter Ease Custom tags
Newsletter Ease Content Areas
Troubleshooting Templates
Subtemplates
Calendar Templates
Greeting Card Templates
Archive Page Templates

Creating a Template

Newsletter Ease does not limit the number of templates that you can create.

There are several places throughout Newsletter Ease from which you can begin a

new template.

The simplest way to create a new template is to use the Templates item in the

navigation tree.

Right-click this item and choose New Template from the popup menu. This

opens the New Template Wizard.

Name your template and then choose the source of your template. If you don't

have an HTML editing tool, you may want to use the Template Wizard.

If you have a Web page editor and feel comfortable with this, you'll want to read

more about creating custom filtering for use with Newsletter Ease. It's fairly easy,

but make sure that you have the following Newsletter Ease tag in your template:

[nle_contentarea].

Templates created with the wizard are designed to be re-used. You don't have to

have a different template for your issue, greeting card, calendar, and archive

page. One template can serve all of these purposes.

If you choose the wizard, you'll see the window below.

Select your template in the navigation tree. You'll see your template displayed

and a palette of tools with which to modify your template.

This palette gives you plenty of choices. Choose the colors, font, border style, and

the theme and background pictures. Customize the body text of each variation of

the template (issue, calendar, greeting card, and archive).

Edit the text as you wish. Newsletter Ease tags are available via the Insert menu.

Preview your template for Greeting Cards, calendars, and Archive Pages

by placing a checkmark in Show Sample Data and choosing the appropriate

item from the dropdown. Once you create the template, click on your Issue and

change to the new template from the Content tab.

Creating a Custom Template

Newsletter Ease uses HTML pages to create your HTML email. You can use your

favorite editor to create the look you want, and then insert Newsletter Ease tags

into your template.

What's a Newsletter Ease tag? It's specially formatted text Newsletter Ease uses

to identify the areas where Content, attributes of an Issue, and Member

Merge Data should be inserted. You can use Newsletter Ease tags in both the

text and HTML files of a Template, however some tags are not supported in text

templates.

Customization can go as deep as your fluency with HTML. The Template

window is adjusted slightly for custom templates. It appears as follows:

The Basics of a Custom Template

If you simply want to take an HTML page and make it ready for Newsletter Ease,

there are only two steps:

Convert all relative links! This is critical. Most HTML editors refer to pictures

and links within a Web page assuming that all pictures and linked files will be on

the same computer. This works for a Web site, where all files associated with the

Web site on the same server. But the moment that you email a page to someone,

that page is no longer on the server, making the path to retrieve the files invalid.

Be sure to comb through your HTML and change relative links (like

src="logo.gif") to hard links (like src="http://www.yoursite.com/logo.gif")

Identify the area into which your content will go.

Place this Newsletter Ease tag: [nle_contentarea] into the spot where your

content should be inserted and you're ready to go.

Newsletter Ease Tags

All Newsletter Ease tags are surrounded by square brackets [ ] and start with

nle_

Additional tags allow you to further personalize the reading experience for your

subscribers.

For use with an Issue Template:

[nle_publicationname] - the name of the Publication

[nle_issuename] - the name of the Issue

[nle_issuesubtitle] - adds the newsletter Subtitle into Issue Details

[nle_issuedate] - the Target Publication Date for an Issue

[nle_issueanchor] - link to the Issue Page uploaded to your Web site

These tags are optional and may be placed anywhere within your HTML

document.

Some Newsletter Ease tags work together. One example is Response tags. These

work to allow your audience to remove themselves from your mailing list. Locate

the place in which you'd like to place your removal link, then insert this tag:

[nle_responseaction]

Highlight the tag and hyperlink it with this link:

mailto:[nle_responseemail]

When you preview an issue, this removal link will appear as Stop my

subscription. When you click on it, it will create an email formatted to signal a

removal. When sending an issue to your audience, including a removal link is

good net etiquette.

If you're familiar with HTML, then here is how these tags appear:

<a href="mailto:[nle_responseemail]">[nle_responseaction]</a>

It will then appear like this:

Stop my subscription

When you upload the issue to your Web site, people who view your email here

probably aren't subscribers - yet. Newsletter Ease transforms this link to a

subscription link for those who view it on the Web site so they can become part of

your audience. The link appears as Start my subscription and creates an

email formatted for subscription.

Newsletter Ease tags can be used to personalize each email sent. These appear as:

[nle_data_*]

where the asterisk is the name of the merge data field that you're inserting, like

Greeting or FirstName. Here are a couple of examples:

[nle_data_Greeting]

[nle_data_FirstName]

If you import other fields into your mailing list, these fields will be available to

use as well.

These Merge Data tags can also be used in the Email Subject Line set in Issue

Details.

To set some defaults when there are blank values, or when you send a preview

copy to yourself, go to the template for the issue you are sending and click on the

Merge Data Default tab. Enter the default values for the appropriate fields

and these values will be used whenever alternate data is absent.

Using Multiple Content Areas

We've briefly discussed [nle_contentarea], the Newsletter Ease tag where all

your content is inserted. This is called a Content Area and deserves special

mention. This is the most extensible feature of Newsletter Ease.

[nle_contentarealist] - hyperlinked list of Content within an Issue

[nle_contentarea] - location for all Content in an Issue

Let's say your template appears like this:

In this issue, you'll find:

[nle_contentarealist]

[nle_contentarea]

If you have 3 articles in your issue, Newsletter Ease replace these tags as follows:

In this issue, you'll find:

Article 1 Title

Article 2 Title

Article 3 Title

Article 1 Title

Article 1 Body

Article 2 Title

Article 2 Body

Article 3 Title

Article 3 Body

Note that [nle_contentarealist] becomes a linked list of the articles.

Newsletter Ease does a lot of work for you just within these tags.

The real power of Content Areas is that you can have multiple Content Areas

with within a template. You might want multiple Content Areas if you plan to

make use of a Sidebar, or if you plan to have sectional content, like this

Local News

Local Article 1 Title

Local Article 2 Title

National News

National Article 1 Title

National Article 2 Title

Local Article 1 Title

Local Article 1 Body

Local Article 2 Title

Local Article 2 Body

National Article 1 Title

National Article 1 Body

National Article 2 Title

National Article 2 Body

The template itself would look like this:

Local News

[nle_contentarealist]

National News

[nle_contentarealist_national]

[nle_contentarea]

[nle_contentarea_national]

When working with multiple content areas, one of these must be

[nle_contentarea], which is the Default Content Area. In this case, we

made local news articles the default.

Define a new Content Area within your HTML document by adding on to the

end of the tag. National, in this case, became [nle_contentarea_national].

Note: You must include the 2nd underscore ( _ ) character when naming multiple

content areas other than the default.

If you intend to include a linked list of articles within a content area, the spelling

must be identical for Content Areas and their corresponding Content Area

Lists. They are counterparts and this is how they are associated.

For example, if you wanted Newsletter Ease to post some content to a sidebar in

your template, you would place the following tag in your HTML document.

[nle_contentarea_sidebar]

You could name this Content Area anything just by following the underscore

with a meaningful word. Just be sure that if you want a Linked Article List for

the content area, the spelling for each is identical.

Troubleshooting Templates

When I enter a Content Area into a narrow area, such as a sidebar, it stretches

my template.

That's normal - long words or Web addresses will push against the sides of a

table's cell. Content Area tags are long, but they're also temporary. Once the tag

itself is replaced by your content, the problem will go away.

If it doesn't, you might consider whether the table's cell might be too narrow.

This typically happens within sidebar content areas, where the column is

intended to be narrow. If the column is less than 125 pixels, it might be too

narrow.

Working with Subtemplates

What is a Subtemplate? Use a Subtemplate to customize the general

appearance of an article for a given content area. It's a template within your

template - a slice of HTML to be used when formatting your article for insertion

into the main HTML template.

Confused? Let's see an example of a Subtemplate in use and why you might

want to incorporate one.

Normally, Newsletter Ease formats an article like this:

What if you wanted more control and more color? How about this:

Notice there are custom graphics framing the article with rounded corners. You

don't do that in the Newsletter Ease editor when writing the article - you design a

Subtemplate to create that look for an article. You can set up several

Subtemplates for use within a Content Area and then simply point to the one

you want for the style you need. In this way, you pre-package the look you need

without having to customize and duplicate it each time.

As mentioned, Subtemplates are a slice of HTML. That is, a Subtemplate is

only part of a complete HTML page - you can't completely rely on editors such as

FrontPage or DreamWeaver to design a Subtemplate for you. You'll need to

view and copy out the exact HTML you need to create a Subtemplate.

If you don't know much about HTML, Subtemplates might require the

assistance of a professional Web designer. If you feel fluent with HTML or feel

confident you can learn to do this, then read on. If you understand and can

recognize <table> tags in HTML, you'll be fine.

Subtemplates offer their own suite of Newsletter Ease tags. Let's review them:

[nle_contentanchor] - the bookmark inserted for articles named in the

Content Area Linked List

[nle_contenttitle] - the Content Title

[nle_content] - the Content Body

[nle_contentdate] - date the content was created

[nle_contenttime] - time the content was created

[nle_contentlink] - a direct link to the content on the uploaded page

[nle_contentreply] - an email link formating the subject line with the

Article Title

[nle_author] - the person who created the content (only available in the

Groupware Edition of Newsletter Ease)

Like the necessity of [nle_contentarea] in the main template, you must use

[nle_content] in a subtemplate. All others tags are optional.

Here's the HTML for a sample subtemplate:

[nle_contenttitle]

[nle_content]

You can copy that sample into Notepad or some other text editor and save it as

"sample_sub.txt" in a folder that you can easily find (like My Documents).

If you use tables throughout your HTML as most Web pages do, we recommend

you enclose your Subtemplate format within a table. If the above example were

done this way, it might look like this:

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><tr><td

width="100%">

[nle_contenttitle]

[nle_content]

</td></tr></table>

The extra paragraph at the bottom with the non-breaking space ( ) is to

ensure other articles aren't butted up against each other. It adds breathing room

to your formatting.

In Newsletter Ease, click on the Template you want to associate with the

Subtemplate. Click on the Content Area, and then click into the Properties

for the Content Area and click on the Subtemplates tab.

We associated this Subtemplate with the "National" Content Area

([nle_contentarea_national]). Notice, you don't see the tag here -

Newsletter Ease replaced it with your Subtemplate to show you how the

Subtemplate will appear within this content area.

In your article, you set the Subtemplate from the Format menu.

Click on the Subtemplate you need and save the content.

When you preview it, the Back to Top link appears right-justified.

Unlike the previous formatting:

This sample with its very simple formatting is only a start. Graphics, table frames,

colors - Subtemplates used within Content Areas are very powerful and very

easy to re-use when configured correctly.

Custom Templates for Calendars, Greeting Cards, and Archive Pages

Calendar Templates

Calendar templates differ slightly from Issue templates. Newsletter Ease will

insert the calendar itself into [nle_contentarea], but the heading of each

page will be inserted into [nle_title]. You don't need to use a title tag, but we

recommend it.

Greeting Card Templates

These work exactly like calendar templates. The name of the greeting card is

inserted into [nle_title] and the greeting card message goes into

[nle_contentarea].

Archive Page Templates

An archive page displays previous issues that you have sent to your mailing list

members. All you need for this is [nle_contentarea] and an HTML comment

you insert anywhere into your template. This comment specifies the content style

of your archive page.

Here's an example of a comment for archive styling:

This format will appear as:

issuename: issuedate

contentlist

Here's an example:

Issue 12: Jul 15, 2004