Buttondown's core writing experience has two animating goals in mind:
- The look and feel of a newsletter (both in the web archives and in your readers' inboxes) should be terrific out of the box.
- The experience of writing a newsletter should be simple and intuitive, and involve as little friction as possible.
We've pushed these two goals forward quite a bit since the start of the year. Not only has a lot of performance work gone in to make everything snappy, but we've launched a bunch of features like pull quotes, poetry blocks, and footnotes vastly improved in-app previewing, and re-built the archives from the ground up to be satisfying and pleasant.
(And the response from y'all has been voluminous and uniform: "do more of that stuff, please, instead of messing around with weird stuff.")
That being said, if you are coming from a different newsletter provider or have a specific use case that requires a more custom experience, the experience of bringing in a completely bespoke template is... not ideal.
Until now! Welcome to the new world of naked mode.
Naked mode is a bit of a power tool to let you drop all the way down to raw HTML and CSS for a given email, bypassing the default Buttondown template and allowing you to build a newsletter from scratch. If the terms "MJML" or [if mso] are unfamiliar to you, this probably doesn't matter — but if you're interested in really customizing your newsletter and bringing in your own HTML altogether, it's now easier than ever.
How do I enable naked mode?
You can swap into "Naked mode" the same way that you switch between Markdown and Fancy mode; right at the top of the editor. (Note that Naked mode is only available for folks on the Professional plan.)