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How do I work with templates that have universal content blocks for system draggable templates in latest api: 4-15-2026

  • April 16, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 117 views
Email Pulse
Contributor I
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Hi,

I’m excited to try out the new functionality to create/update system draggable templates but I’m running into a few issues. 

It seems like whenever I try to do anything with a template that has a universal content block in it I get errors such as follows with an update: Klaviyo error (non-retryable): Template T4axuT contains universal blocks and cannot be updated. Universal blocks are reusable components shared across multiple templates.

I also tried to copy the definition from an existing template and create a new template with that definition and I got a similar error that I can’t use universal_id in template creation.

 

Is there no way to reference universal content blocks or update a template that has a universal content block? 

The sites that I work with all heavily leverage universal content blocks for reusable components, particularly headers and footers and such so it would be necessary to be able to update those kinds of templates for this to work.

Does anyone have any familiarity with this or how to workaround this? 

For creating a new template I can certainly strip out the universal ids and then it will just create a template with that content but without the universal content link but that doesn’t seem like a very good story for my clients.

 

Thanks

Best answer by emma.owens

Hi ​@Email Pulse and ​@Shiroyasha , 

Thank you for reaching out to the Community! Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. 

Currently, our APIs do not natively support referencing universal content blocks directly in the payload. You'll need to fetch the block's content (via Get Universal Content), add the content to your template, and upload the final HTML. See our Universal Content API overview for more information on managing universal content blocks via API.

I have also submitted this as product feedback so that hopefully we can resolve this limitation in the future. Let me know if you have any follow up questions! 

    3 replies

    S
    Contributor IV
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    • Shiroyasha
    • Contributor IV
    • April 19, 2026

    Hi, has anybody found a solution for this? I too am trying to clone templates through API, but it looks like universal content blocks aren’t transferred to the cloned templates, unless i convert them into non-universal blocks :(

      emma.owens
      Community Manager
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      • emma.owens
      • Community Manager
      • Answer
      • May 15, 2026

      Hi ​@Email Pulse and ​@Shiroyasha , 

      Thank you for reaching out to the Community! Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. 

      Currently, our APIs do not natively support referencing universal content blocks directly in the payload. You'll need to fetch the block's content (via Get Universal Content), add the content to your template, and upload the final HTML. See our Universal Content API overview for more information on managing universal content blocks via API.

      I have also submitted this as product feedback so that hopefully we can resolve this limitation in the future. Let me know if you have any follow up questions! 

      Email Pulse
      Contributor I
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      • Email Pulse
      • Author
      • Contributor I
      • May 18, 2026

      Hi ​@emma.owens,

      Thanks for your reply.

      The challenge here is especially when I’m trying to update or modify a client’s existing templates through the api since most all templates will have universal content blocks in them. The api has come a long way and is almost there to where we can make some really useful dynamic modifications using the api but it not recognizing the universal content blocks existing in the template for when I make a change or update and then the update failing makes it still not quite usable for that scenario. Commonly what we do is create universal content blocks that a user right now has to drag into an existing template to add our features to that template but would be great to bridge the gap there and just do the template modification directly for them. And even some other simpler template updates would be helpful, like just changing a text field or something of that nature but right now the api post fails because of the templates having existing universal content blocks already in them.

      Hopefully product team can fix this up in future release as that would be really useful for the community at large I’m sure.

       

      Thanks!

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