Does anyone have really beginner-level resources for learning how to do email script tokening? I've never done it before and feel like I missing out on some really cool/useful stuff.
One of the problems I'm trying to solve is:
If the lead picks "Consultant A" then show "Schedule Consultation" (with a hyperlink to Consultant A's calendar.)
then,
If the lead picks "Consultant B" then show "Schedule Consultation" (with a hyperlink to Consultant B's calendar.)
Lastly,
if the lead picks "Unsure" then show "Schedule Consultation" (with a hyperlink to Consultant A's calendar, b/c they are our default.)
I've read a couple of Sanford Whiteman blogs, and I feel like they are way over my head.
All help appreciated!
Something I mention in my Velocity classes is that the language was originally created as an easier-to-use, faster-to-market way to write code in a Java shop. Meaning it was still expected to be used by developers -- maybe very junior ones, but not folks who had zero interest in/exposure to datatypes and OO ideas.
It's apparent from the Velocity Tools docs that you're supposed to know what an int[] is (an array of int primitives) and there's no special explanation of stuff like that. Even when introducing the very simple #foreach/#end structures, there's mention of Collections and Iterators, which you could skip over and still write good code but there's a clue to a wider world.
Velocity does a ton of automatic type juggling for you that Java would never do, making it without a doubt exponentially faster for writing emails, web pages, or other text output. But if you ignore the Java underpinnings, you'll be confused when you run into a fatal error thrown from Java-land (like aStringIndexOutOfBoundsException).
I'm planning some short(ish) posts on the Marketo blog to deal with individual technical details of Velocity. They won't be dumbed-down, though, there's just no way to do that.