Still waiting for an actual Gutenberg experience in the email editor
I was really excited to read all the news about FluentCRM 3.0. I have a number of clients that use it and I always recommend it for clients looking for all Wordpress solution to contact management and bulk email. It's affordable, reliable and powerful
I was especially excited to hear that the email was going to be "a truly Gutenberg-native experience" because all my clients complain about how limiting and weird the email editor is compared to what they can do when they are building posts and pages.
So I was really disappointed to give v3.0 a whirl on a client's development site and to discover that it's not, actually all that. See on my clients' Gutenberg Wordpress sites, I can install a plugin block suite like Kadence or Otter or whatever and use those their blocks when I build pages, posts etc.
But not FluentCRM emails. There are more blocks available in v3 to be sure, but none of the ones that I use to build the client's site. So I still have to hard-code the email templates to have them appear consistent with the site's branding and design.
Also, the campaign archive function still doesn't include archives of recurring campaigns. My clients want this because they need to be able to show their funders/grantors etc their ongoing email communication. But only regular email campaigns are supported.
Thank you for FluentCRM and for bringing it along. I expect version 3 will still be useful to my clients eventually.
Thank you for this thoughtful feedback, Chris — and for being such a strong advocate for FluentCRM with your clients.
You're right to call this out. We're continuously working to improve the Gutenberg editor, but the core challenge is that email HTML is fundamentally different from web HTML — blocks from third-party suites like Kadence or Otter generate browser-optimized markup that's very difficult to reliably convert into email-safe HTML. We're actively exploring better solutions and will share updates as they develop.
We've also noted the recurring campaign archive gap.
Thank you for your patience — feedback like yours directly shapes where we focus our efforts.
I haven't updated anyone to 3.0 yet, but have used fcrm for years. My approach for clients is to have them build a post for their emails. Could use a CPT too. They have a list of which blocks they can use. Then I give them instructions to copy/paste the code into the email editor. They get to work in the more comfortable Post editor and they can publish to their site. Not perfect, but workable.
Kristin Aus I like that for clients that compose their campaigns manually although I don't relish the task of figuring out which blocks they can use. Thank you for the suggestion. I look forward to a solution that works with using automatically generated recurring campaigns, which, to me, is the golden fleece here.
Chris Lawson My help docs are for version 2.x, not for 3.0 yet. (I need an AI agent to update all the things, haha!) But maybe they will give you a starting spot. I have two short ones and I'll try putting each in a comment here. We'll see if that works.
1st Help Doc
Creating Newsletters
Start in a New Post
You can build the newsletter in the Post editor as long as you limit yourself to just a few core WP blocks. Do not, for example, use photo galleries or cover blocks – two of the best blocks out there.
Be sure to use Headlines in your newsletter Posts. They really help people reading your newsletters. Links and Buttons are really useful too!! Be sure to add buttons with links to related places in your website! You’ll have to open another tab, go to the page you want to link to button to and copy the URL. The regular linking mechanism doesn’t seem to work.
In FluentCRM free, you can only use these blocks
These are the blocks you can use. Remember, emails end up being read on a huge variety of devices and using a huge variety of different kinds of email software. That is the primary reason for the restrictions.
Note: The Gallery Block is NOT on this list. You can’t use it because it won’t work with Fluent or email formats. Column blocks can do something similar.
Paragraph
Heading
List
Table
Verse
Image
Buttons
Columns (I’d stick with only 2)
Group
Spacer
Custom HTML
Paste into the FluentCRM New Campaign
After you have the Post made, your next step is to paste that post into your email.
2nd Help Doc
Oh, well. My second help doc isn't very helpful anymore. It's just a video of me making a client's newsletter. I used to just have her let me know when she wanted to send one and I'd copy/paste but then I recorded myself doing it and she's done it since. The catch is that now it is out of date because the editor looks so different.
Basically, you make the Post (or newsletter CPT if they need that). Then you go to the 3 dots menu and display the post as code. Select All in the content box. Go to Fluent CRM where you have a new Campaign started. Do that by going to Create Campaign, choosing Gutenberg, going into that screen, 3 dot menu, code editor. Now you can just paste from one code editor instance to another. Exit to Visual editor and check things out. I have to tweak button colors etc because I never get that part figured out.
That basically covers my old system in the new interface. However, I'll bet you can just copy/paste blocks. I haven't tried it yet. And there must be a way to get global styles to come through so we have our branding colors in our emails. I just haven't taken the time yet . . . .
And, yes. I accidently had FluentCRM on auto update in one client's site - my best newsletter writer. (which is just once a month) So I deserved the panicked message I got at 10 pm one night that "I have a newsletter ready to send and everything is different now!" Embarrassing, but I have updated to 3.0 now. 🤣
Chris Lawson I would love to hear more about what you said:
" I look forward to a solution that works with using automatically generated recurring campaigns, which, to me, is the golden fleece here."
That does sound exciting . . . .