Email – myVUpreview
myVUpreview is an email newsletter that goes out to all Vanderbilt faculty and staff each Monday and Thursday. The email is managed by the Vanderbilt News Service.
They wanted to move from a text-only email to an html email – and they needed to be able to quickly and easily build these emails without writing a single line of code.
Enter wordpress. In a very different use of wordpress — we broke down each section of the email into a post. Those sections are all editable from within WP’s wysiwyg interface (handy for noncoders) — they can upload photos, automatically crop the images to predefined sizes (so they don’t have to worry about all the thumbnails being the same size — it does it for them!).
Another template automatically builds out the text only version that is linked to from the top — it simply strips out all the images and layout — and has only the text. This is done in the background though — so the editors only ever have to create one email. The full html version with photos and the text version are built from the same content.