Is using the Rich Text Editor AND Variables inside 1 Module too much to handle for Marketo?

[artur92]

Hey guys, 

it's me again. We're having another issue with making our Email Code compatible within the Marketo Editor.

After fixing the most issues, there's still one weird behaviour by the editor we do not understand and would like to fix. 

So we have created a module for our newsletter template where we want to give users an overview about our latest blog posts. This module consists of 2 parts:

- The 1st part is the heading and article description, where we used the Rich Text Editor ("mktoText") to make the text editable. We decided to use RTE instead of Variables as it would be a pain to edit the longer article descriptions within the single line textfield we get from using variables. 

- The 2nd part are the variables, mainly used for CTA and UTM. So we have variables to define the CTA text, the CTA URL and our UTM (which is global for all CTAs used in this mail). It looks kinda like this inside Marketo's editor: 

The issue we have is that every time we want to edit the Button URL, we have some visual glitches inside the email editor. The Text Module for article description gets somehow "erased" and the content is pasted right beneath the erased module - just without styling:

When we are making further edits inside the text part (therefore we have to double-click this erased module), the "new" content will be shown - but also still the old content right beneath the module: 

As far as we're concerned, this is only viewable in the editor - so when sending a sample, the unstyled part which doesn't belong there won't be shown in the mail. 

Note that this also only happens if we change the CTA Link first and the Article Description after that. If we do it the other way around, it seems that everything is working fine and there are no glitches within the visual editor.

Do u know what could be the reason for this? We've attached a small sample of the code which maybe gives a little more insight:

https://privatebin.auxaws.de/?c0fc0b449c96bcc2#8AffmkqKup1TiMB4AbHRR4oqT3RCWqXur93z4vyHbc2C 

Honestly we cannot explain why this is happening - the only thesis we have is that using Variables AND Rich Text Editor inside one Module is just too much to handle for Marketo. Another theory might be that it could have sth to do with our Fallback Buttons for Outlook or Windows Mail? (which are by the way, a pain to optimise... still haven't found the "perfect" settings for height and line-height yet and sometimes text still gets cut off very badly... but that's another story :D) 

Maybe there is even a better way to design a module like this? Looking forward to your insights 🙂

Thanks in advance and best regards

Artur

 

[SanfordWhiteman]

What you’re describing is a very standard module config — it wouldn’t make any sense to not support editable areas and vars in the same module. Someone like @Dave_Roberts is gonna be a good resource to check out your template and see what’s wrong.

[NiharikaGoyal]

Hi @artur92 

Hope you are doing well.

I have checked your code that you have shared. 

To make the things editable by using mktoText, please make sure you will not add the mktoText in the <TD>. mktoText should be immediate after the opening <TD> inside the <div>.

Like <div class="mktoText" id="" mktoname="">

Let me know if this is resolve your problem or it would be helpful if you can share one small video clip for same the problem which you are facing.

Hope above solution would work for you.

Thanks!!

[artur92]

Hi @NiharikaGoyal @SanfordWhiteman thanks for your input! 

It seems like using <div> instead of <td> is doing the trick. I will have to apply this to the remaining modules of our template and keep testing - if everything is working fine, I will mark your answer as correct solution. 🙂 

[Dave_Roberts]

For what it's worth, I grabbed the code you posted and created a new template in Marketo and then spun up a new email asset from that code. I didn't have any issues with editing the Button Text or URL and wasn't able to recreate this glitch on my side.

I'm not sure if it's the case for you, but I've noticed in the past that when I create a template and then spin up a "tester" email asset on that template and then go back and edit the template that there can be some strange things like this that happen in the Email Editor. An example of this is if you were to change the id="" value of an editable area at the template level b/c those are kinda "stored" in the email asset once you create a new email. When the id value changes, the email editor is still looking for that component and sometimes it's there or maybe it's something different. Perhaps if you had the button setup originally as a "mktoText" area when you created your test email it might explain this behavior? 

In any case, the way to test around this kind of issue is just to create a new email asset from your latest template code and see if that fixes the problem. In terms of process, I'll normally toss my test email when I make any major updates to the template for this reason and just reapprove my template code and then spin up a brand new email so that I'm sure there's nothing weird going on under the hood.