Inheritance and managing inheritance
In this article, we're going to learn about inheritance. We'll also look at why you would use inheritance, breaking inheritance and restoring inheritance.
Inheritance means any content or changes you make in the Parent Version will take effect in all other Versions. So if you write a headline in your Parent Version, the same headline will appear in all your other Versions. Or if you change an image in your Parent Version, it will change in all your other Versions too. If you don't want all your Versions to inherit from your Parent Version, you can break the inheritance.
Why use inheritance:
Inheritance is a very powerful feature that will prevent duplication and enable you to produce a large amount of content in a short time.
It will also make editing and changing multiple Versions much faster.
How do I know what inherits from what?
Every single element, in every single mailing, has an inheritance icon to the right of it.
If the element is inheriting from the Parent Version you will see this icon:
If the element is inheriting from the Email Design System you will see this icon:
If the icon is blue, the Version is inheriting from the Parent Version or Email Design System specified.
If the icon is greyed out, then the Version is not inheriting. If you change something in a Version that is not the Parent, that automatically breaks the inheritance.
Breaking Inheritance:
Inheritance can only be broken from within a Child Version. You can break inheritance by editing any part of your Child Version. Inheritance is broken on an element by element basis. E.g. if you change the sub-headline in a Child Version but not the header, the inheritance will be broken for the subheadline only If you then change the sub-headline in your Parent Version, it will no longer update the Child Version
Restoring Inheritance:
Open the Child Version you want to restore the inheritance in
Click the part you want to change
Select the grey icon this will then turn blue and you will see the content in the preview change
Module Inheritance
In the Parent version of each mailing, you can choose what other versions a module will appear in.
To select which modules you want in another Version:
Select the 'Include in Versions' icon in the module header
2. This will open a panel to the left of the module 3. Here you can select and deselect what Versions this module is included in If you untick the Parent Version the module will become hidden in the Parent version 4. Select 'Apply Changes' to save your changes You will then be able to see these modules in the selected Versions
If your mailing has only one version the Parent Version you will see an icon to hide the module as there are no versions to add the module to
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