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It’s been a while since our previous release but it turned out Mosaico is pretty stable/solid and easy to extend via plugins!
On the other side it took 4 iterations to have our first 0.17.x stable release, namely the 0.17.3, because of unexpected issues with the newer version of our dependency TinyMCE and because of bugs in Safari rendering engine (WebKit).
Let’s see the changes…
One of the strengths of Mosaico is its template-based approach. Most options Mosaico gives you when you edit a template are not hardcoded in the Mosaico Library. Instead, they are defined in the “master template”, by the template author.
A major design choice in the “template language” was that the template language is simply an extension to HTML, so that you can open a master template in your browser and see how it looks like, or you can edit it using your preferred html editor.
This is a major advantage when you have a master template with few options, but you’ll find repeating and copy and pasting a lot of html code if you want to create a full featured master template like our Versafix.
The repeating and copy and pasting tasks usually get you to more bugs, so while we updated our Versafix master template we decided to build a small generation tool to help with “deduplication” and maintenance.
Mosaico flagship master template is named Versafix-1 and the current version (1.0.6) is used by thousands of users around the world, every day, to create effective and responsive emails.
In the past 2 years we analized how people used Versafix, what were the most commonly altered styles and collected a lot of feedback and feature requests!
We followed the suggestions, but before we detail the improvements, we want to let you know the basics:
GoodEnough, a small web agency from Paris, just published a full web application built around Mosaico to let companies easily install a complete environment where multiple users can work on email templates using Mosaico.
The project repository started as a Mosaico fork, but in fact we now see it as an application that depends on Mosaico. We are working with GoodEnough so to let their customization being developed as plugins instead of altering the main code, so it will be easier to keep up with new Mosaico releases.
The App has a very good looking material design and is very easy to use and you can easily appreciate their UX skills!
Mailtrain defines itself as “Self Hosted Newsletter App Built on Top of Nodemailer”: it’s an open source project, born in 2016, meant to be an alternative to commercial ESP to who prefer a self hosted service, with complete control on the software beneath.
Mailtrain has grown a lot in the past year, and has a fairly huge fanbase (over 1.300 stars on GitHub): its ambitious roadmap includes not only the basic newsletter send features (list management, custom fields, list segmentation, bounce analysis…) but also a number of advanced tools, like RSS campaigns, GPG Encryption, Automation.
Yes, today MOSAICO grows up: exactly one year ago, we released the first version of MOSAICO code on GitHub.
We’ve always thought that MOSAICO would have been a “game changer” in email template design: for the first time a complete and functional responsive email editor was released as an open source project.
Since that day MOSAICO project raised over 400 stars and 140 forks on GitHub, growing day by day.
After more than an year of research and development of Mosaico our Email Editor, we decided, this september, to let it out as Open Source project on gitHub.
This decision was made after thinking a while, some dozen hours of meeting and an undeterminated number of coffee cups (espresso, please).
Mosaico is born to be the standard responsive editor of the italian indipendent ESP VOXmail. Developing it was an hard work, trying to keep the UX as smooth as possible and maintain a certain level of flexibility.
The features and the complexity of the editor (and the flexibility given to the user) are based on the template itself and not hardcoded in the editor interface. This means that potentially anyone could convert his template in order to work with Mosaico.