Email newsletters - want option to specify resource folder path

[warwick]

News1110A.zip

We publish regular email newsletters using a bulk mailing application. It has an HTML editor but its really basic.

As an existing Xara user, it seemed that the Designer Pro web page capabilities would provide a great tool for quickly generating HTML email content.

But no, not in Designer Pro 7.

The problem is that Xara does not give an option when you 'Publish Web' to specify the path of the resource folder - it is always relative to where the web page is, not an absolute address.

So, for example, if the page is News_1110.htm the resources folder with the graphics etc will always be in subfolder News_1110 and you can't specify it to be http://www.test.com/News_1110

So trying to use News_1110.htm as the content in an email just wont work -all the links are broken.

As a workaround I have manually edited the .htm file to change all the references and that ends up working perfectly (see attached sample of the working result). However it is cumbersome and error prone.

-->> THE SUGGESTION for the next Designer Pro release - provide an option in 'Publish Web' to have either a relative path for the resources, or specify an absolute path (typically on a web server).

That simple addition would make Xara a great newsletter tool.

Thanks, Warwick

[gwpriester]

Sorry nobody has responded to this message. TalkGraphics is more about games and challenges these days.

Isn't the resource folder named when you name your site? I always name my site on publish as index.html and DP7 creates a resource folder index_html_files. This folder is always found in the same root directory as the index.html file. So if my site is yada-yada.com then the path to the resource folder is yada-yada.com/index_html_files

What am I missing here.

[mwenz]

What you are missing Gary, is that the path is still relative in the code:

../index_html/image.png

not

http://www.mysite.com/index_html/image.png

So emails, which do not contain the resource folder(s) cannot view the images.

The simple solution because the paths are relative, is to use a decent text editor and do a search and replace in the resultant html files. NotePad++ is an open source editor (free) that is a good one.

Take care, Mike

[angelize]

What I would like to see is for xara to have integration with a newsletter service, so that you could design your newsletter in Xara and then have an export as newsletter option that would connect with the service and give you access to the automated list management, double opt in, etc. features that a service provides. For example I use Mail Chimp and they have a really generous free account and they are looking for integrations with other software, they may even fund it!

[gwpriester]

Thanks for that Mike.