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Early stage InputfieldMailChimpCampaign


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InputfieldMailChimpCampaign

This is the very early state of a basic Inputfield & Fieldtype for creating & updating a MailChimp campaign. 

What it does:

on create

  • Creates a campaign on MailChimp
  • Sends the url of the page (where the inputfield lives) to MailChimp and uses that page as campaign.
  • Attache a mailing list to your campaign.
  • Add several settings.
  • Upon save ( check update on MailChimp checkbox ), let MailChimp pull a text-version of the campaign-page and store it on MailChimp. 

on update

  • Update all previously set settings except the campaign ID
  • Create a new text vesion of the campaign

What you should know:

  • Your page must be reachable from the internet.
  • And your page must be in a published state.
  • It's just pushing values from ProcessWire to MailChimp. Settings changed in MailChimp self will get overwritten upon page save.
  • It's only handling campaign create & update. Send functions are not included.

You can download it on github.

---

note: It's in development state. 

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Great stuff Martijn. Didn't test it yet, but interested to hear how it works. You add this field to a template, and this template becomes a newsletter. You can choose mailing list for the newsletter and the content comes from the actual page(?). Can you send the newsletter through PW also?

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This is great Martijn! Interesting approach with using a fieldtype I never really thought of.

As you've seen the other thread, I'm working also on a MailChimp integration myself. It was for a project of a friend who needed an newsletter and I first started creating some self brewn but abandoned it because handling of all the nice features and sending batch mails would get to tedious if not impossible at all. It's at best would have been only for really small amount of mailings. However I then decided to give MailChimp a try and changed the whole module to implement MC. It consists of a bunch of admin pages that gets setup when installing, where you can manage your campaigns and lists and select a page or enter a url for the newsletter to be used and the list. Then do test sends or final send. After sending you can see the stats of the campaign. So far it's working great but I planned to integrate, groups and segments too for creating campaigns which allows for using lists more flexible as you can't create new lists through API.

My friend is using it now for a simple newsletter but I'm still working and reworking a lot of how it works and implement more features. I hope to share my module, but I think it's still not ready yet and takes some more time.

I think why not have two different modules for allowing MailChimp in PW? It's great to see and have two different approaches and further we could share thoughts and experiences. I'm not sure we could stick together and go for a bigger project? Or what do you think?

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Sounds great. I think that maybe the mailing list selection should be done just before sending and in the same place (process module)?

The list is needed to create a campaign. So we need to select a list. The list is just an ID, so if you update the list (external), it's still working with this approach. You can change your list on update ( page save ). About the actual page, I just give MailChimp the URL where the chimp can pul the campaign from.

Sending the campaign, managing list and all other stuff could be done with a process module or Soma's Approach.  :cool:

Soma, I did saw your post before, thats why I posted about this fieldtype so early. I think this field type is still lacking some functions right now ( select groups for example & some basic monitoring ) but it doesn't have to do loads of things. 

As stand-alone it could be great for giving a place to live for the newsletter. But if this one and yours work together it wil be a real nice package. I love the idea !

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  • 3 weeks later...

@Soma,

This Fieldtype is working so far. But I want to expand the list thingy with groups. As I think selecting groups and maybe segments belong to this Fieldtype. 

Is there somewhere I can use/abuse code from you for this ? And what's your opinion about letting the modules work together.

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@Soma,

This Fieldtype is working so far. But I want to expand the list thingy with groups. As I think selecting groups and maybe segments belong to this Fieldtype. 

Is there somewhere I can use/abuse code from you for this ? And what's your opinion about letting the modules work together.

Great to hear it's working. Sorry I haven't been working on it much lately. But it's working roughly so far.

I'm not sure thinking about this two modules working together, I think it doesn't go that well as I thought. I don't see what the benefit of it would be to be honest. My module let's you manage campaigns and choose a page to submit. These pages are normal pages you build under some parent and set the page parent in the module config. 

I'll have to take a look again at it but currently are busy with other stuff.

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That's not a problem, but more wishfull thinking on my part.

I'm quite busy to with lot of other stuff to. But Sooner or later we need the groupings functionality. I will investigate & lookin' throught the MCAPI and wil figure it out I think. 

Thank you for your message 

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  • 3 months later...

Ipa, it's fine, just not as complete integration as I'd like to.

Also I've done some reading (after creating the module) for MailChimp integration using API and it seems that my currenty integration it could create problems if requests are made too frequent, and it would need to do caching. Which throws me back a little.

Also the creation of Lists isn't possible through API and you have to create them manually on MailChimp. It's a intended limitation as they encourage to use segments and groups within fewer list rather than create a List for each. And there's where it gets more complex or a lot of work.

I'll hope to have time soon to get into a state where I can share it. Or if somebody wants to have a go and help out I'm always glad to collaborate.

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Sorry it's so quiet around the fieldtype... The development is stand to a hold, cause there's to much work on the table.

One other thing, segmenting the list & interrest groups are quite complex if you're not an experienced developer like me.

(that is were it is now localy) Next to that, there's a lot of overhead in the way I programmed it.

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  • 1 month later...

On the __contruct(), the MailChimp Api class gets called looks like there's something broken there. The MCAPI.class.php should be loaded there.

I strongly advise not to use this plug-in now. As it is standing still for months now.

Recently I started to look at it again. ( Actually I'm busy with it now, building in Segmenting options )

My wish is that it will be workable soon, but time's not on my side. ( Next weeks gonna be very busy, vacation, doing nothing but drink beer & make some fun)

I will post it here when it's in Beta...

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  • 2 months later...

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