Part of creating the 33 new HTML templates for Campaign Monitor and MailBuild was to also come up with an easy way to test these designs without having to leave the comfort of my development environment. Since most email clients render HTML email better with inline CSS, maintaining an organized yet easy to update template becomes next to impossible (especially when building 33 of them).
It just so happens that TextMate has an incredibly useful plugin architecture called “bundles” that could deal with this problem rather easily. Here’s a quick demo with the details below.
So what we did was create a bundle that does exactly that. Create your email like you would any other webpage with a linked stylesheet or inline style. Run one of the bundle commands and it automatically runs through adding all of the CSS styles inline keeping it easy for you to update. Even better, you can email an HTML multipart email directly from within TextMate! Testing has never been this easy.
If all of this sounds too good to be true, hop on over to our TextMate bundle resource page. Be warned in advance though, this is definitely one of the most developer targeted resources we’ve ever thrown up. And of course, if you haven’t got access to lots of different email clients, our design and spam test tool can run it through more than 20 of the most popular clients with a single click.
