Dynamic Content

Dynamic Content is one of the most powerful features available to you in JungleMail for Office 365. With Dynamic Content, you can automatically and dynamically populate your email content with data from your SharePoint lists or libraries. In this tutorial, you will learn how to do this.

Configuring Dynamic Content for a section

In this tutorial, we will enable Dynamic Content for a section. To begin with, it is good to know that Dynamic Content can be enabled for a whole Section or on a particular Block. When Dynamic Content is enabled, it is reflected in the border of a particular section or a block, as it will change the color to light blue instead of green.

To configure Dynamic Content for a section, take the following steps:

1. Select the section that you want to be populated with SharePoint content. Then, in the section properties window on the right, select the Dynamic tab, switch the Enable SharePoint content toggle to On, and select Add list / items.

2. In the pop-up window, browse to the SharePoint Online page with the content that you to include in your newsletter, and click OPEN. Select the Dynamic content extraction method and choose the source of the content, and click Select.

3. Now, it's time to build a template a bit further. Simply drag and drop the desired blocks to form the section layout. In the example, we are using a 2-column layout with an Image block for the picture, a Title block to display our title of the news post, a Text block to display the news content, and a button to link back to the page.

4. With the layout in place, we need to connect each block to the related column of the SharePoint library that we've selected earlier. 

Let's start with the Image Block. Select the Image block, then click the {Merge Tags} button in the menu on the right.

For the Image block, we link to the Banner Image column and click  Insert.

The configuration result: 

Next, we will configure the Title Block to display our article title. Select the Title Block,  and click the  {Merge Tags} button.

We want our Title block to show our article title, and the corresponding column in the Site Pages library is Title, so we select it and click  Insert.

The corresponding column in the Site Pages library is Title, so we select it and click  Insert.

Finally, we configure the Text Block to display the actual content of the article. Select the Block and click {Merge Tags & Links}.

Then, browse and select the column you need to include as text content in your newsletter and click  Insert. In our case, it is the Description column.

For the button block, change the display text from the default, select the button block, and click the { Merge Tags } button in the menu on the right.

Insert the Item URL placeholder

This is how the Section looks after the configuration: 

Adding conditions (optional)

5. To filter out irrelevant content, you can add conditions to the Dynamic Section. Let's take a look at how to set this up. 

First, let's add the following conditions:

ArticleType column | is equal to | value | Places to visit

AND

Article Date | is greater than or equal to | formula | Today - 7

The first condition filters the articles assigned to the topic "Places to visit", while the second condition includes only those matching articles that are 7 days old or less. "Today - 7" is a formula, and you can learn more about JungleMail formulas here.6. You can also add sending conditions to your automatic campaigns. In the example, if no recent news is found in the library, the campaign will not be sent.

Previewing results

To preview your newsletter, go to the Preview step. Here, the Dynamic Content has already been processed and you will be able to see what it would look like.

If you are happy with your result, you can save this template for future use. This way your actual newsletter will be updated with new and matching articles automatically. However, if you want to review or use the Dynamic Content in the email builder itself, you can do this by simply clicking the round-arrows icon. This will then immediately load the Dynamic Content from your selected SharePoint list.

Result after processing:
Please note that after using Process Dynamic Section, Dynamic Content becomes static. It means that you can edit this content as you like: move it, replace it etc. If you save this template with the intention to use it later, keep in mind that it will not reflect any changes that may have occurred in the SharePoint list. To save a fully dynamic template, undo the processing changes and save the template without processing the Section.