JRLitmus Builder
Friends, email designers, cohorts...
We are over the moon to announce that Litmus Builder is now available. But, what is Builder? And why should you care?
Builder is a code editor built specifically for email designers, by email designers (us). It allows you to quickly build emails using pre-built templates, your own saved snippets, or from scratch. Its tools are geared towards email designers and allow you to quickly navigate your email and code, view a live version of your design in desktop and mobile while you're developing, and quickly quick of testing at any point in the development process–both through Litmus Email Previews or by sending yourself a test email.
We've been using it internally for the past year for all of our emails and couldn't be happier with it. We think you'll love it.
You can read more about Builder on our blog and try it out for free right now. Oh, and did I mention that you can embed your code and designs anywhere?
Here's the Builder embed from our launch email:
If you've been frustrated with posting code in the Community before, Builder embeds are the perfect way to share what you're working on. Simply use the Share button within builder, copy the Embed Code in the popup and paste it right into your Community discussion.
We'd love to hear your feedback for Builder, so feel free to post your thoughts below!
One small thing. In Dreamweaver I can click within the designmode on something and it automatically goes the to the specific code in the codemode. This is possible in builder when gridview is enabled, but not when gridview is disabled. Is it possible to add this functionality as well when gridview is disabled?
Hey Wilbert,
Grid View must be enabled to achieve this functionality. The grid helps you identify what you're clicking on. The view of the preview pane in Builder allows you to interact with and preview links in your email as you typically would in an email client, which we view as being really valuable. Not sure that we will add the ability of Grid View without the grid part in the near future.
Thanks for your reaction. Maybe if it's a feature more people want.
Am I the only one who can't create another new project in builder? I keep getting a 504 error. It worked great for me right after the webinar, but now when I try to start a second project and play with it more, it just times out. (I only have a community account -- would that have anything to do with it?)
Hey Carey! Can you email me at hello@litmus.com w/a link to your Builder project and account info? I'll check it out and see why that 504 error is occurring. Thanks!
Danielle,
Have you made any progress on the 504 error? It still times out for me and I can't seem to make another email or project. I was excited about the tool, but....:-(
Litmus Builder is totally sweet - and we love all that Litmus does. While it's perfect for our developers/designers, I am looking for help in finding an email friendly Editor program that we can build into our messaging app - used to create emails by our non-HTML / Visual-only customers. We'd love to find a service that we can embed, API-integrate ... can be white label or even co-brand, allowing for visual email content building, including drag/drop of dynamic elements we have, use of templates, basic formatting options, etc. Does anyone have any recommendations for an existing product?
And/or Litmus, any plans to have a "visual" pane in Builder?
Litmus Builder is totally sweet - and we love all that Litmus does. While it's perfect for our developers/designers, I am looking for help in finding an email friendly Editor program that we can build into our messaging app - used to create emails by our non-HTML / Visual-only customers. We'd love to find a service that we can embed, API-integrate ... can be white label or even co-brand, allowing for visual email content building, including drag/drop of dynamic elements we have, use of templates, basic formatting options, etc. Does anyone have any recommendations for an existing product?
And/or Litmus, any plans to have a "visual" pane in Builder?
Hey Bob!
I'm not sure that there's a visual email editor out there that you can embed/integrate into your own app. For visual email editors, I highly recommend Campaign Monitor's Canvas, MailChimp's email editor, StampReady, and Stamplia's Email Builder.
We don't have any immediate plans to build a "visual" editor for Litmus Builder, but you can vote/comment on features on our public roadmap here: https://trello.com/b/ekREy3ql/litmus-builder-roadmap. The visual editor feature already exists here: https://trello.com/c/0j6DB78d/22-wysiwyg-visual-editor - so be sure to give it an upvote. Hope this helps!
Great builder! But it would be really great if you can highlight the opening and closing tag of the element you are focused on!
I love Litmus Builder, especially the pop out mode so I can have mobile and desktop view on one screen and code on the other. There's just a few minor things I miss that Dreamweaver gives me that increase my workflow which has stopped me using Litmus Builder as my main email coding go-to. I didn't realise just how much I use the breadcrumb hierarchy to select parent tables when working with nested tables, and there's a few tabs I feel I miss by not using Dreamweaver, for example the properties tab for quickly checking and changing things like links and alt text and the search tab so I can see when I've used find and replace. I'm a little torn at the moment and end up using a hybrid of both (it's a good job I have two big screens!).
I really want to love this tool, unfortunately at this point it just isn't running smooth enough to get me out of dreamweaver. It defiantly has a lot of potential and I am not going to give up on it yet.
I am anxiously waiting for bugs to work themselves out. :)
Hey Russell!
Thanks for letting us know! Are there any bugs or anything in particular that's keeping you from using Builder? We'd love to know because we want to make the product as valuable as possible for you. There's also a public roadmap feature board where you can comment and vote on features: https://trello.com/b/ekREy3ql/litmus-builder-roadmap
And hey, Dreamweaver has been at the game for 17 years, we haven't even been working on Builder for 1 year yet haha. We'll win you over with a little more time =)