CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Don Lobo asked me to do a review after I complained about CiviMail on Twitter. Here's the review:

The whole process sending email is all mucked up. There are five steps to adding a new email. They are in this order:

Step 1. Select Recipients
Step 2. Track and Respond
Step 3. Mailing Content
Step 4. Test
Step 5. Schedule or Send

This is a terrible workflow as it results in users having to skip to step 3 simply to make a one word change in their email. Here is a suggested workflow.

Step 1. Mailing Content and Test
Step 2. Select Recipients
Step 3. Track and Respond
Step 4. Schedule or send is fine

Test should be available from Step 1. A little pop-up window can handle the recipient in the case of a test. This will result in a much faster workflow for users interested in quickly editing out emails. I've noticed that emails tend to be tested and approved by multiple rounds of editors so concentrating on the create-edit portion of an email's lifecycle is crucial to workflow.

The mail editor also needs some reworking. CSS generated within the mail editor should follow guildelines at http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/. Buttons on the editor should be removed for features not universally compatible or at least people should be given that option. Right now, I can't remove those buttons that will create the most havoc for users. This is a huge problem.

Template selection should have small screenshots accompanying each template selection. A simple AJAX call to a screenshot for every template would be great. This is a problem in general with the create-edit portion of a CiviCRM email's lifecycle. There's no thought given to that part of the process.

There should also be a special mode for making and testing HTML headers and footers. It's ridiculous how complicated it is to build new headers and footers because the screens require 2 or 3 button presses to make a round trip between editing an HTML header and footer and actually testing it in an email. There should be a special set of screens that allow people to rapidly prototype HTML headers and footers without having to step into the UI for building an email from scratch just to test it.

Bugs I Run Into

Can't cancel emails in Ver 2.2
Token insertion is hard to do with longer emails because the tokens don't appear at the cursor when you hit the insert button
Track opens feature doesn't always work and has a tendency to replace links badly -- I've stopped using it and rely on Google URL builder instead.

Extra Features
You should also include a way to build links via Google's URL builder tool at http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578 and build them into the HTML editor.

I deal with hundreds of our own organisation's end users who suffer through the same problems with the current work flow and must agree with the comments made by Abenamer. I found them blunt, perhaps, but not particularly discourteous. I hope the technical people in the community can respond with some real work in this area.

I thought the review was fair and brought up some good points. Some additional comments:

1) I like the proposed revised wizard flow. Makes sense to me. The advisory group has also had discussions about moving away from dependence on wizards. CiviMail, unlike Events and Contrib Pages, kicks you back into the wizard when you return to edit a mailing. Events/Contrib Pages gives you the list of available config pages to edit so you can skip ahead. In some future release (unlikely 3.0) I suspect there will be some changes to the dependence on a wizard for the mail flow.

2) The WYSIWYG mail editor is a plugin. Civi doesn't really "manage" the options available for FCK or TinyMCE -- it just plugs it in. And I don't believe the core team plans to provide any interface mechanism for managing what buttons are available. But both editors are configurable. You can read up on them and alter what buttons are available to your users.

Bugs:
1) I don't have issues canceling mailings. What problem are you running into? The cancel option is only available after a mailing is scheduled and before it is completed.
2) Token insertion is improved in v3.0. I agree, the insertion at the bottom of the email was a bit of a pain to deal with. The 3.0 functionality inserts at the cursor.
3) URL tracking/rewrite -- what problems have you had? Personally I've seen an improvement in functionality with recent releases. If you have a google url builder enabled on your site, maybe the issue is a conflict between the two systems. Personally, I would prefer the tracking be native to CiviMail as many people (myself included) aren't using google url builder.

-Brian