Today we’re proud to announce Partials. Partials are reusable pieces of content you can use across any of your channel templates.
As your product grows, so does the number of notification templates you have to manage. This slows down your ability to make changes across your notifications while maintaining consistency.
With Partials teams can create modular pieces of content to use across their templates. Partials are independently updated, versioned, and archived, and can be managed programmatically with the Knock CLI and management API.
Partials are available today for all Knock customers. Sign up for an account on our free plan to give it a try.
Author a Partial
You can author partials in HTML, markdown, plaintext, or JSON, and just like in our templates, you can use Liquid to add dynamic variables to your partials.
Use a Partial
Once you’ve created your partial, you can render it within your templates using our render tag and pass in arguments for any liquid variable tags you added to your partial.
We’ve also added partials to our typeahead autocomplete in the template editor, so you can quickly browse your partials and see the parameters available for each one.
Use a Partial as a custom block in our visual block editor
We’ve even added the ability to use HTML partials in our drag-and-drop email editor.
This means you can write your own HTML partials, provide those partials with liquid fields, and enable non-technical members of your team to use them within Knock’s visual editor.
Partial nesting
Partials can be composed within other Partials, which gives your team flexibility in creating content.
As an example, with nesting you can design a template system for a call-to-action where the URL is handled by one Partial, which is nested in a Partial for a button and separately nested in a Partial that uses plain text. Content writers can choose the button or plain text Partial in the appropriate template without having to worry about the URL being up-to-date.
Complete lifecycle management
We were careful to ensure that Partials would fit seamlessly into your larger template management workflow. Partials work with Knock’s existing capabilities for template previews, testing, and translation.
Partials management is not confined to the Knock dashboard. You can use our management API and CLI to interact with your Partials programmatically. This enables you to version control and manage Partials in your own codebase.
See Partials in action
Knock DevRel Jeff Everhart interviewed Connor Lindsey, the Product Engineer who led the development of Partials. They discuss how Partials was built and what platforms we borrowed inspiration from, then walk through a demo of Partials in action.
Partials is the latest improvement to Knock’s powerful template management features
Recently we shared the key principles for template management that guides our product. In line with those principles, we’ve rolled out several new features and improvements to template management:
- We enabled typeahead and auto-complete in templates to make it faster to author content with fewer errors.
- We added a text formatting bar to Knock’s editor so writers can apply styling to markdown templates using a familiar interface.
- We enhanced our templating for in-app notifications to support actionable messages, without needing to drop down into code.
- We added a method for drafting message templates in your default language and auto-generating translation files behind the scenes to automate localization.
Partials is available today to all Knock customers. You can get started by reading our documentation.
If you’re new to Knock, you can get started with a free Knock account, which gives you access to Partials and 10,000 notifications sent for free per month.