June was a busy month for us, full of steady improvements to a young product. We spent most of it making the email editor more flexible, adding a few thoughtful AI helpers, and giving you more control over who on your team can see what. Almost every one of these came from a request or a bit of feedback, so thank you for that. Here is a look at the highlights.
A more flexible email editor
We made some of our biggest editor changes yet this month. Every block can now carry its own styles, separate from your main email style, so you can give a single block its own background color and adjust its padding and margin. That is what finally lets images go edge to edge in a card style email.
We also made the editor feel more direct. You can now type on every block right where it sits, not just on buttons. Speaking of buttons, you can type to change their text in the editor too, instead of reaching for the sidebar. And because blocks now control their own spacing through padding, we were able to retire the old block spacing setting. Videos also got a small touch: they now show a play button so people know there is something to watch.
View your emails in the browser
You can now view any email in the browser. The link sits at the bottom of every email, so when something does not render quite right in someone's inbox, they have an easy way to see it the way you intended. In a text block, you can also type @view-in-browser to drop that link in yourself, and because it is unique to each recipient, your merge tags like first name, last name, and email keep working.
A taste of AI: subject lines and cleaning up text
While we keep working on our AI email builder, we put out a small taste of it this month. Our subject line generator can help you find a strong way to say what your email is about. We would love for you to give it a go and tell us what you think.
We also added a way to clean up text with AI right inside a text block. We do not think you should hand AI the job of writing what you are asking your congregation to read, but it can be a real help for tidying up copy you have already written.
More control over who sees what
Keeping certain lists and emails private matters, so we added more granular permission controls. You can now choose whether a member has access to emails, people, QR codes, and link pages, and you can set those permissions right when you invite them. You can also restrict who can see specific lists, their list members, and the emails sent to them, which helps protect anything confidential. If you would rather lock things down by default, you can change the default sync permission in settings so new lists are visible to owners only.
A custom footer address
You can now set the address that shows in the footer of an email to something different from your main account address. We also brought rich text editing to the footer description, so you can add formatting and line breaks to it.
Fixes and improvements
A handful of smaller updates that made June better:
- When previewing an email, you can now see a table of every link it contains, and your link pages show how many times each link has been clicked.
- We now periodically check for Planning Center lists that are missing from your account, and we let you know when a list you are sending to is still syncing in.
- Lists and list permissions now live under the People tab, and you can manually refresh your lists from the Actions button on the Lists page.
- We now proxy images in emails so they load reliably for people using Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, and sent images are cached to load faster.
- Test email addresses now stick around in the input, so you do not have to retype them every time you send a test.
- QR code scan statistics load significantly faster, and tables across the app got quicker with more options to sort and filter.
- We fixed bugs where newly added blocks could disappear, you could not set a corner radius of 0, and pasted text rendered inconsistently.
- We fixed an issue that occasionally caused text emails to take 30 or more minutes to send.
That wraps up June. Log in to try these out, and as always, tell us what you would like to see next.