Installing the Plugin

  1. Welcome!
  2. Create an application
  3. Production vs. development apps
  4. Manage users in your developer account
  5. Add JavaScript Library
  6. Initialize the editor

Welcome!

Welcome to the BEE Plugin documentation! We’re thrilled that you’re interested in integrating our builders into your application and providing your customers with a seamless and beautiful content creation experience.

BEE Plugin is a versatile content creation platform that offers three distinct visual content builders, which can be easily integrated into your application in a matter of minutes. These builders include the Email Builder, the Page Builder, and the Popup Builder. Each of these builders is designed to meet specific content creation needs, allowing you to offer a tailored content creation experience to your customers.

In addition to the builders, we also offer a standalone File Manager application, which can be used alongside any or all of your builder implementations. This File Manager application is specifically designed to simplify the organization and management digital assets.

BEE Email Builder

An email editor that makes building gorgeous, mobile-ready emails a breeze.

BEE Page Builder

A delightful tool to design beautiful, effective landing pages in minutes, without writing a single line of code.

BEE Popup Builder

An easy to deploy, true WYSIWYG solution for designing standout popups.

These products share the same, unique combination of design flexibility and ease of use. Please note that all of the documentation in this site applies to all builders, unless otherwise specified.

As you will gradually discover, BEE Plugin also offers great liberty in how you can integrate it with your application, and we are here to support you along the way. Let’s get started!

Create an application

The first step to embedding BEE in your application is to sign up for an account. Once that’s done, you will be able to log into the Developer Portal.  That’s where you will:

  • Create applications (e.g. an instance of BEE for emails and one for landing pages).
  • Create development applications for all sorts of dev, QA, or staging environments.
  • Configure them: BEE has both server-side and client-side configurations.

Whenever you create a new application, we will ask you to provide some general information so that they are easily recognizable for you in the Developer Portal. This only takes a few moments.

For each app, we will also provide you with a Client ID and Client secret, which you will use to authenticate the editor when you initialize it in your app.

BEE Plugin Development Portal - App details

Go ahead and create your first application in the BEE Plugin Developer Portal.

Production vs. development apps

What you just created is your production application: you will use those application credentials (Client ID and Client Secret) in your production environment.

For development purposes, you may wish to create a development application. If you’re on a paid plan, you can do so easily by clicking on Add a development version below any production application. You can create multiple development apps, for different purposes (e.g. QA, staging, testing new features, etc.).

Development apps inherit the same plan that your production app is on. If you wish to test features that are available on a higher plan, go the application details and click “CHANGE PLAN” in the upper right.

Child application details

Manage users in your developer account

You can invite users to your developer account, in case you need other people to assist you with the integration of BEE Plugin. To do so, go to Manage users from the personal menu in the top right.

Go to the personal area in the top right of the screen

 

The user that initially created the account is identified as the account owner and can add users from this page.

Manage users screenshot

 

Additional users will be identified as admins. The owner may limit access to certain production apps when creating or editing an admin.

The account owner has these additional privileges, compared to admins:

  • add, edit or delete users, as described above;
  • turn on two-factor authentication, using tokens provided by mobile apps like Google Authenticator or Authy. 2FA can be enabled either for specific users, or account-wide from the Settings & Security section in the personal area (learn how to set up 2FA for your account);
  • change the company’s name, also in Settings & Security.

Add JavaScript Library

Congratulations on registering your first application!  Now it’s time to install BEE Plugin. The first step is to add the BEE Plugin library to your application. You can use plain HTML or our convenient NPM module.

HTML




<script src="https://app-rsrc.getbee.io/plugin/BeePlugin.js" type="text/javascript"></script>


NPM



npm i @mailupinc/bee-plugin

Initialize the editor

Step 1. Create a container

BEE Plugin will load into any HTML element on your page.

We recommend starting with an empty div, as follows:




<div id="bee-plugin-container"></div>


Step 2. Authentication

BEE Plugin cares about your security, so let’s create a standard JSON Web Token, or JWT, to authenticate your application.  Don’t worry, it’s easier than it sounds!

Simply pass your Client ID and Client Secret to our authorization service, and we’ll send the token back to you.

We talk about this step in detail here, but here’s a quick example using jQuery:

jQuery




var endpoint = "https://auth.getbee.io/apiauth";
 
var payload = {
  client_id: "string", // Enter your client id
  client_secret: "string", // Enter your secret key
  grant_type: "password" // Do not change
};
 
$.post(endpoint, payload)
  .done(function(data) {
    var token = data;
    // continue initialization here...
  });


Step 3. Create a plugin instance

Now that you have a token, you can initialize the editor into your empty div.

To do so, you will call the create method, which has three parameters:

  • token:
    This is the result of the previous step.
  • config:
    This contains your settings and event handlers.
  • callback:
    This is a function that receives the plugin instance

Here is an example in plain JavaScript:




// Define a global variable to reference the BEE Plugin instance.
// Tip: Later, you can call API methods on this instance, e.g. bee.load(template)
var bee;
 
// Define a simple BEE Plugin configuration...
var config = {
    uid: 'string',
    container: 'string'
}

// Call the "create" method:
// Tip:  window.BeePlugin is created automatically by the library...
window.BeePlugin.create(token, config, function(instance) {
    bee = instance;
    // You may now use this instance...
});


The following table shows all of the required configuration settings:

Attribute Type Description
uid string An alphanumeric string that identifies the user and allows the plugin to load resources for that user (e.g. images).
  • Min length: 3 characters
  • Can contain letters from a to z (uppercase or lowercase), numbers and the special characters _ (underscore) and – (dash)
  • It is a string and not a numeric value

It uniquely identifies a user of the Plugin. When we say “uniquely”, we mean that:

  • It will be counted as a unique user for monthly billing purposes.
  • Images (and other files) used by the user when creating and editing messages will be associated with it and not visible to other users (when using the default storage).
container string Identifies the id of div element that contains BEE Plugin

Step 4. Start the editor

The final step is to the start the editor by loading a template.

To do so, call the “start” method as follows:



var template = { ... }; // Any valid template, as JSON object
 
bee.start(template);