Is there an easy way to edit the email newsletter template? Will there be?

I’m currently sending out letters to my mailing list manually, but I also publish them to my website on a page that isn’t the homepage: https://sashinexists.com/letters

It would be pretty cool to be able to do this all from within ghost, and it would save me time too.

However, at the moment I’m using my own styling so the emails I send out really match the way my website looks.

I was wondering if it is be possible to do this from ghost, or if this may be a feature introduced in the future.

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I’m not sure if you’re using a third-party service to send out your emails. If you are, check out Zapier and see if they have an integration for you to use.

If you’re currently manually writing & setting these emails in your normal mail app, you’ll likely have to change your workflow regardless of your choice of CMS.

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I already use ghost for my website, I currently blast my emails out with Mailgun. I write the markdown, use a script to convert it to strict html styled to look like my website and another to blast them to my mailgun list.

The members feature in Ghost is still in beta, so features like this are still under consideration. Sharing your workflow is still very helpful as feedback though :hugs:

I’m happy to be of help :slight_smile:

My desire is to be able to theme the email to any extent that would be possible, ideally so that the emails match the ghost theme of the website.

Although even a dark mode would be a decent step in the right direction.

I understand email styling is very difficult of course as the differences between mail clients is much bigger than that between browsers.

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High everybody, I created a new idea here based on my and the other needs concerning this feature :slight_smile:

Please vote as well so that we can support the prioritization.

Best regards
Sebastian

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I’ve added my vote to your idea - just wanted to say, the members feature is amazing in theory and has the potential to rival the likes of substack. It’s only lacking this one small-but-huge thing, which sadly makes it so far impossible to build an actual business/member community around. Excited for the Ghost team to get to this feature!

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Me too!

Hi @sashinexists,

you can edit the template.js file at:
/ghost/versions/3.13.1/core/server/services/mega/template.js

It contains the html template along with the css styling for the newsletter email., sent out through mailgun integration

Just know, that you’re editing a core file of ghost, so a future update of your ghost instance could overwrite your customization (keep a backup).

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This definitely helped me! Thanks a bunch @daniel1 !

I commented out the post content (line 885) so only the title and featured photo will show in the newsletter.

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I’m trying to make some changes to template.js but the newsletter keeps it’s default style. I’m running Ghost with a subdirectory as domain. Any idea why the newsletter won’t reflect the changes? Thanks.

As rough a method as it is, editing template.js did the trick for me. A couple of important tips:

  1. Changes to this file do not appear in the preview in Settings → Email newsletter → Customize. That preview uses quite different looking HTML, containing a bunch of div elements with class gh-members-emailpreview, rather than the table elements with inline style used in template.js. The changes do however, appear in the Preview of the Post itself, when you select the “Email” preview mode.
  2. The site object is not as full loaded as I expected other Theme development hacking I’ve done. For example, in order to access the logo URL instead of the icon URL, I had to modify post-email-serializer.js (in the same directory) first. I added logoUrl: publicSettings.logo ? urlUtils.urlFor('image', {image: publicSettings.logo}, true) : null to the line after the corresponding one for the iconUrl. I could then access it in template.js using site.logoUrl.

In short, it only took me 4 hours today to figure out how to change the icon image that appears at the top of the email to the logo image instead, and move it up a few pixels. Hopefully my breadcrumbs help others get where they need to go faster!

I forked Ghost and change (to spanish and more friendly language) but I don’t know how to update Ghost from my repo and not from official.

I will learn by try and error, like almost always :slight_smile:

Another vote on newsletter theming! It would be a huge win and make Ghost usable as a viable alternative to other platforms.

Also, slightly lower priority since its achievable with Zapier, but still +1 to custom transactional emails (ie welcome email)

Is that now located at {{blog.title}} ?

ghost version 5.47.0

for the email template there is an hbs file at:

/var/www/ghostfolder/versions/5.47.0/node_modules/@tryghost/email-service/lib/email-templates/template.hbs

There are two files template.hbs and template-old.hbs, I have modified both.

Is there an easiest and cleanest way to modify template of newsletter mails? It works but I don’t like that I have modified things under node_modules, does anyone have a better solution?

Also after an update you have to replace again the files because they will be overwritten.

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