Live Preview & Mustaches

Version 0.7.0 is out, and it brings a bunch of developer-friendly upgrades to make working with SFMC just a little less painful (and a little more fun). The spotlight feature? Live Preview, but there’s plenty more under the hood — including templating upgrades, version tags, and the quiet removal of some stuff nobody will miss.

It’s Alive!

Forget uploading just to test your static Cloud Page. Or a dynamic Cloud Page with custom APIs. The new Live Preview feature lets you develop and test everything on your machine, with Mustache templating baked in.
Yeah! that’s what sets it apart from other Live Previews.

This is just perfect for pages that use APIs or fetch data from SFMC — or if you just want to see what you’re building without touching the cloud.

The gif shows you, how easy it is!

Commands:

• Start Live Preview: boots up the local preview server. New status bar in bottom right corder will appear, showing you your PORT.
• Stop Live Preview: shuts it down when you’re done.
• Get Live Preview URL: gives you the link to your local preview so you can open it in a browser or share it with your imaginary coworkers. Or real ones, if you use tunneling service like expose or ngrok.

Auto-reload is also supported - F5 and CMD + R keys will get some rest. Turn it off in Preferences if you do not want your browser to refresh on every file save. And yes, there’s a new Templating column to help keep things clear.

Few more features, like enabling of optional security header or change of server PORT, are available in the config file (.vscode/ssjs-config.json, key: live-preview).

Oh, you don’t think anybody would ever use this? Try it out on your next page. You will not want to go back…

Templating Upgrades

Templating got some love too:

Copy Templated Code: applies your current environment tags (via Mustache) and copies the output to your clipboard. Quick, clean, and paste-ready.

{{VERSION}} tag: drop this in your code and it’ll auto-fill with the current datetime. Great for knowing when something was last deployed — like when Engagmenet is getting stubborn again!

Other Improvements

• New Refresh Config button in the Config panel.
• Latest Changes now show the Changelog.
• Minor visual improvements to the Templating panel.
• A few internal refactors and some pesky bugs got stomped.

RIP: Features nobody used…

Telemetry told me, nobody like those anaway, so why support them?

• The old Server provider is gone. No one used it. It’s fine. We’re fine.
• Commands like Start, Stop, Create Config, Update Config, and Deploy Any Path were sent off into the sunset. You’ve got the Config panel now.

Did you by any chance used Server Provider? Don’t worry! You can save your files as .html and use tunneling as before to reach your files from SFMC.

That’s all folks

All in all, version 0.7.0 is a solid upgrade for anyone building pages in SFMC. It’s faster to test, easier to template, and comes with fewer commands you’ll never use. Now go forth and preview html locally — because uploading just to see if a button works is so 2024.