Developing a Marketing Cloud email locally with AMPScript is a pain

Question

I am developing an email locally that is tightly coupled with both AMPScript and a Python application. Almost all content including text and images uses AMPScript for one reason or another. This makes local development very hard because if you want to change anything you have to run it through the Content Builder to see your changes.

So for example if I change the font size on a headline I have to reload the page in my Python application, copy the generated HTML, save that on a public server, and then run the Content Builder in Marketing Cloud that uses httpget() to call the public page, then finally I can see what the email now looks like. It takes about 5 minutes in total for each test. Is there a better way to do this?

Solutions would include:

• Executing AMPScript locally, maybe with dummy data.
• Calling an API with the full HTML body and receiving the rendered result

With either solution I could develop programmatically instead of repeatedly copying and pasting HTML by hand.

Answer 1

I would use your second option: Calling an API with the full HTML body and receiving the rendered result.

There are a couple of things you should implement to improve your development efficiency.

1. Retrieve Email Preview from API

I've documented the API method in this answer. You would need to write an app or script to parse the value of content from the response payload, but this will contain your email which has been rendered by OMM.

That will enable you to quickly generate the email personalised with a record from a sendable DE.

Note: I've only been able to get this to work with Classic Content emails, so you may need to use Classic Content during email development, then create a Content Builder email once you have completed your testing.

2. Work From Local File

To avoid having to copy and paste to a public webserver each time and preview an email from your local computer, I'd simply use Dropbox (which is free) and do the following:

1. Save your html file to Dropbox
2. Copy the Dropbox public link — it's persistent so you only need to do this once. You can get this link simply by right-clicking on the file or selecting the Dropbox icon in your system tray/menu and clicking 'Copy Link' next to the file.
3. Paste the following code into your HTML email in Marketing Cloud: %%=TreatAsContent(HTTPGet('insertDropboxPublicLinkHere'))=%% (this is the only code that should appear in the email).
4. Remove the query parameters from your Dropbox link and change 'www' to 'dl'. For example, change https://www.dropbox.com/s/i4j9xxxxh/myFile.html?dl=0 to https://dl.dropbox.com/s/i4j9xxxxh/myFile.html then paste this into the insertDropboxPublicLinkHere placeholder.
5. Save the email

Then, each time you save changes to the HTML file on your local computer and retrieve the email preview from the API, the rendered email will reflect your changes.