Missing Templates with Email Campaign Manager in Sitecore 7.5

I have been working with debugging some Sitecore issues as of late and they have all seemed to deal with modules or packages being installed. Frustratingly, it seems like there is a different outcome among instances when I install a module on a Test server, and install the same module into a clone of a site on my local development, or another developer's machine. The latest culprit is the Email Campaign Manager (ECM).

Installed into a Staging server, the ECM module worked fine, allowing us to go through and create messages and test the system. However, I installed the same exact package into my local development environment, that was basically a clone of Staging, and when I went to create a message, the template options were empty.

So you know what I am talking about, take a look at this:

In contrast, what I was expecting was this, taken from Staging:

It took me some digging to figure out what was wrong, but thanks to this blog post about Building custom newsletter templates for Sitecore’s ECM 2.x (http://www.newguid.net/sitecore/2013/building-custom-newsletter-templates-for-sitecores-ecm-2-x/), specifically Step 7, I identified it was due to the Insert Options for the message type pages. Both my "One Time Message" and "Triggered Message" lists were empty, as were the Insert Options for both, which were populated for Staging.

Solution

If you encounter this scenario, the solution is relatively straight forward:

1. Within Sitecore Content Editor, browse to Sitecore/Content/Home/Email Campaign/Message Types.
   
   
2. Select the "Default" item beneath "One Time Message" or "Triggered Message", whichever is empty.
3. Switch to the "Configure" tab on the Sitecore ribbon.
4. Click on "Assign" in the "Insert Options" box.
   
5. Using the "Insert Options" modal, you need to assign the proper templates as options. The default templates are actually split between two areas, as some are derivatives of the basics:
   
   • The "Plain Text Message", "Base HTML Message", "Simple HTML Message", and "Pre-existing Page" options are all listed under "Templates/Email Campaign/Messages".
     
     
   • The others, "One-Column Message", "Two-Column Message", and "Newsletter" are listed under "Templates/Branches/Email Campaign/Messages".
     

Once you "OK" out of the modal, the changes will be active and you can go back into the Email Campaign Manager and click the message type under the Create menu, and the list should populate the updates. If you are missing the list in both "One Time Message" and "Triggered Message" lists, just perform this process for both.

There they are! Woohoo!

An additional side note

You can also reorder the items in the list if you like to have frequently used items toward the top for your managers, and you can remove any templates you don't want people using. And if you want to create new, custom templates for people to use, just follow the link to Building custom newsletter templates for Sitecore’s ECM 2.x.