Newsletter – Extended Composer Blocks
Introduction
Welcome to the all-new Newsletter Composer! Through this guide, we would like to offer an overview of the new features available within the Visual Composer and help our previous users migrating from the old editor. Please read on carefully and if still in doubt don’t be afraid to contact us through our forums or social accounts.
2. Starting the editor
Starting from the main Newsletter Dashboard, click on the “Newsletters” and then on “Create Newsletter”. This will take you to the new composer, which is now the default newsletter creation tool. If you still want to use the old editor, you will be offered an option to do so on the following screen: this is particularly useful if you have created your custom themes, as they will show up exactly like they always did. However, please note that once a tool is selected you will be able to edit that newsletter only with that tool: composer-created newsletters cannot be edited with the old editor and vice-versa.
When you click on “Create Newsletter”, you will find our presets. Click here to know more about them.
3. The working space
After selecting the preset, you will move to the working space. The main working space is divided into two sections: the newsletter area and the blocks sidebar.
Newsletter Area
In the main newsletter area, you will see your newsletter, simply drag and drop the blocks you want to include! Starting from the upper section, a standard newsletter is commonly made of a header, a body and a footer. The body area, in turn, may contain a text paragraph, a hero image, a call to action and so on. This is basically what you will see the first time you open the composer.
You can notice the header, with the logo and a service text, the body, with a hero image, a paragraph and a call to action, and a footer, with contact information and some “legal” text at the very end.
Sidebar Area
On the right, you can see the sidebar area with all the blocks. They’re grouped by functions: Header, Content, Footer, based on which section of the newsletter they are commonly related to.
4. Composer settings
in you click on “Settings”, at the top right corner of the composer, you can change the global styles of your newsletter. You can chaing the main background color, the blocks color, fonts and button styles.
5. Adding a block
To add a block from the sidebar to your layout just click and drag it from the right area to the left, then release it in the desired position. If you feel a block is not where you would like it to be, you can always move it up or down just dragging and dropping it on the new position.
6. Removing a block
To remove a block from the layout, just hover on the blocks in the newsletter area and two icons will appear on the right. Clicking on the x icon will remove that block from the layout. You can repeat this step until you have a blank layout and then start over by dragging your preferred blocks.
7. Editing a block
Our composer lets you edit the block and its content as well. Content-level customizations will always overrule block-level customizations. Keep this in mind when setting global font families, for example.
Block Options
If you click on the pencil icon, a modal box with some layout options will come up. All the options set in this box will affect every item of that block: e.g., if you set a specific font family using this option, all the text blocks inside that block will use that font family. This lets you specify some general styling across the different parts of your newsletter. The same applies to the background color. We will take a more in-depth view of all these options in the 10. Editing the blocks section of this guide.
Content Options
Every block will have some specific elements that can be edited: e.g. the image block will let specify the image source and link, the header block will let you upload your custom logo and some introductory text. This edit box differs from element to element but they are all quite self-explanatory: the Edit Text box will let you edit your paragraph…and so on. We will take a more in-depth view of all these options in the 9. Editing the content section of this guide.
