Mautic Theme Skeleton

A skeleton for the Mautic theme with configured SCSS compiler, css inliner and html minifier.

This repository might be used as good start for configuring theme development process as well as a tool for building more complicated pieces of emails (something which is hard to develop in Mautic's content editor).

It incorporates a bunch of standard tools like (pre-processor, css compressor, css inliner, etc) into building pipeline which makes email layouting less painful (just a bit though ;)).

Currently it supports e-mail themes only.

You might also want to check Advanced Templates Bundle which greately extends e-mail building capabilities.

Features

• SCSS compiler - you can use powerful SCSS syntax and mixins
• HEML - a tool for building responsive emails. It also does a great job on embedding CSS\SCSS into html so you can keep styles in separate files and forget about copy-and-paste approach. Check out official site for more information about HEML features and syntax.
• Minifier - does compression of the resulting html files to optimize final email size.
• Allows to compile ready to upload Mautic theme. You can simply upload zip file via web interface.
• Allows to work on email content\snippets which are not a part of your theme leveraging all power of heml and scss.
• Designed to support generation of multiple themes basing on the same source code base.
• Easy deployment for development purposes. Compiled theme could be automatically copied to corresponding mautic folder so you can check result immediately.
• Automatic rebuild (watch) - no need to run compilation after each change. Script monitors changes to the source code and re-compiles automatically.

Requirements

The only requirement for the workstation is installed NodeJS. If you haven't it yet consult with official site on installation instructions.

It is also assumed you already have an instance of Mautic configured and deployed either locally (preferred) or on some remote machine.

Getting ready to work

1. Download or fork/clone this repository
2. Open terminal and navigate to the project directory. NOTE: Keep project's folder outside of your Mautic folder.
3. Run npm install to download all dependencies
4. Optional Open package.json and set property mautic.mauticBasePath to point location of the root of your Mautic installation. This might be a relative path as well as absolute. You may skip this step, however automatic deployment and automatic rebuild features will not work in this case.
5. You may also want to familiarize yourself with Mautic themes building basics. Check out this official guide.

Usage

Please note, this repository doesn't contain any ready to use theme. It is just a bootstrap project (skeleton) for building your own. We will check a few typical usage scenarios.

Please complete all steps from the Getting ready to work section prior starting any further activities described below.

Creating own email template

1. Edit section mautic.themes of the package.json file:
   • Set name to something without spaces and special characters. It will be used to name files and folders.
   • Update verboseName. This is what you will see in the list of available themes in Moutic.
2. Edit file src/config.json file:
   • Leave name empty
   • Update author and authorUrl fields
3. Feel you free to update files under src/assets and src/heml folders.
4. Build your theme with npm run package. Output should appear under build/themes directory.

Building code snippets

If you liked this toolchain during theme creating you might be interested if it is possible to use the same for designing emails content which is not a part of the theme itself.

Yes, it is possible with compile command:

1. Create a file for your code snippet under src/emails folder. NOTE: Make sure to use .heml as an extension. E.g. welcome-email.heml
2. Put your heml here, include css in needed.
3. Run npm run compile -- --email FILE_NAME_WITHOUT_EXTENSION. E.g. npm run compile -- --email welcome-email NOTE: Notice no file extension here.
4. Find your compiled snipet under build/emails. You can just copy the code and paste it in the Moutic's editor.

Maintaining multiple themes

In terms of Mautic theme provides just one single email template. However it is highly likely you need a couple of layouts with similar but slightly different look and feel. In that case you will need to create a few themes.

The problem here is obvious - if you copy this repository a few times you will need to support multiple code bases and also common part (e.g. styles, colors) will be cloned as well so you will need to incorporate changes\fixes in couple of places.

In order to avoid this mess this tool allows you to build multiple Mautic themes from the unite code base. In this example we will create 2 themes: my-theme-1 and my-theme-2:

1. Edit section mautic.themes of the package.json file:

"themes": [
  {
    "name": "my-theme-1",
    "verboseName": "My Theme 1",
    "emailTemplateFile": "email.my-theme-1.heml.twig"
  },
  {
    "name": "my-theme-2",
    "verboseName": "My Theme 2",
    "emailTemplateFile": "email.my-theme-2.heml.twig"
  }
]

IMPORTANT: Name of the file should be in the format "email.your-theme.heml.twig" you are allowed to change bold part only. It is very important to follow this convention! 2. Copy src/heml/email.deafult.heml.twig two times to create email.my-theme-1.heml.twig and email.my-theme-2 .heml.twig 3. Make content of those files slightly different to make sure we will compile 2 separate themes. 4. Run npm run package to compile both. You should get 2 zip files under built\themes.

All CLI features (available commands)

Credits

Dmitry Berezovsky, Logicify (http://logicify.com/)

License

This repository is licensed under MIT. This means you are free to use it even in commercial projects.

Please also keep in mind, the MIT license clearly explains that there is no warranty for this free software. Please see the included LICENSE file for details.