I understand it may be time-consuming to make it work out of the box. NS’s own custom picker is not necessary.
However, I think a setting on the email level would be a good option that could address the issue and make it easier to manage email variants. Is it possible to do for v16 or v17? We are soon going to upgrade our Umbraco, so a solution for U13 is not necessary, but for v16 or v17 would be great to have.
To be honest, it is very difficult and time-consuming to manage absolute links for existing content in every email. The URL picker is for choosing content, but it is not obvious that it is not working, and it is easy to make a mistake for various editors if they forget to check every URL.
Also, even if the links are absolute, going back to the email content and editing the email content again before sending the email can erase the absolute links because the URL picker automatically replaces absolute URLs with the content-picked ones once you get into the editor again and save the email content again. So it is replacing working absolute links with broken links. So every time we need to correct the content, we also need to check and replace every content URL with an absolute URL.
I am not sure it makes sense. Can you see the issue I am describing here?
Would you like to share the link to the issue you reported so I could follow as well?
Since Umbraco allows variants out of the box, we also expect NS to handle variants in some way, at least not to break the email content because variants are not supported.
We are happy to use NS despite the setup being quite complex on some levels, but this issue reduces the usability of NS for our purposes in the long term, and we cannot use it as much as we could.
I agree on that for now, might take another decision depending on the level of interest on the Github issue.
This is a good approach, but it would be even better if it was natively supported. If I was to add the culture now and a fix for links would be added in the future the culture-setting would be more or less deprecated I guess? Or do you see other use cases for that in your scernarios?
I understand your frustration and that having a better support for these types of links would be a good addition to the package. I will monitor the progress in the Github-issue and consider other approaches as well.
Hi, I quickly took a look at the issue you reported to Umbraco.
Umbraco supports picking up content link variants out of the box, eg, if you are adding content for an English variant, then it automatically selects the link in this variant. So that seems intuitive and logical. I don’t think there is much need to select another variant link in Umbraco content pages because this indeed can be occasional, not required for every content page. So this can be handled by absolute URLs. Because of this, I guess the Umbraco team won’t have much interest in adding such an option to select a culture on inserting a URL.
Now, NS is different because it is out of the Umbraco variant context, so Umbraco won’t know what variant link I need. Therefore, I should at least get the default variant URL when inserting a content URL. At the moment, this is not working at all. The link always breaks/ comes empty for multi-variant content.
So to sum up:
Basically, the main issue is that links get broken not because there is no variant selection available, but just because variants exist on the linked content.
If, upon inserting a URL into the email body, I get a default variant, that will be enough to resolve this issue.
There is a fix for this included in the latest version of v13,v16 and v17. So in your case, you’ll want to update to Newsletter Studio v13.0.19.
The workaround that I’ve implemented basically will:
Try to find the link for the default culture
If not available on the document, it will grab the Url to the first culture variant for the document.
I hope this works around the problem. Long term there will be a option to configure the culture for a email so that links can be resolves based on that, but this will not be implemented in v13 - most likley in v18.