30-Jul-2026 — markdown template shells, shorter welcome email, and usable link and source editing #303

build 805 — commit b45acd1

Email templates

Delivered email templates are now markdown rather than HTML. Markdown was already the working format everywhere a person touched a template: the body editor converted the delivered HTML to markdown before showing it, the content-block editor did the same for every block default, and sending rendered that markdown back to HTML. Wording therefore made a lossy round trip, and the delivered files were the only place HTML was hand-authored. The shells are now the same format as the editor that edits them, and markdown renders to HTML only when sending.

The welcome email is now a welcome rather than a manual. It ran to eight sections, most of them about logging in. Walks and social events, including walk leader contact details, are public, so an ordinary new member has no reason to sign in. Committee members and walk leaders, who do need a login, already receive their details through a separate email.

Editor

Editing links in a long document no longer throws you back to the top of the page. The link bar is now part of the sticky editor header, so it stays in view wherever you are in the document, and it lets you change the link text as well as the address. Links can be opened from the editor in a new tab, either from the bar or by Cmd/Ctrl-clicking a link, so checking where a link goes never disturbs what you are editing.

A Markdown button switches the content area between formatted editing and the raw markdown, for the times when editing a run of links by hand is simply quicker. Edits made in source view save without switching back.

An empty column now shows its placeholder text, so there is something visible to click into. Asking for text on a column that holds an image puts the cursor straight into the new editor rather than needing a second click.

Resetting an email body to the delivered template no longer loses the images a group has set up. Images already in the body are kept, and any image the template has no section for is listed above the editor with Insert and Discard actions, rather than being silently dropped.