BIOSTALL

There are lots of email marketing applications out there nowadays but by far my favourite is MailChimp. Alongside its strong use of AJAX to build an easy-to-use interface and its witty banter displayed throughout, it also has a great API allowing third parties to integrate with MailChimp accounts through simple POST requests.

By using the existing class provided by MailChimp I have now amended it so that it can be easily referenced through the PHP framework CodeIgniter by way of a new library.

Downloading and Installing the Library

You can download the library from the following location:

Download Library

View GitHub Repository

Within the ZIP there is a config file containing your MailChimp API key and the library itself. These should be placed into ‘application/config’ and ‘application/libraries’ respectively.

Your API key can be obtained by logging into your MailChimp account and navigating to ‘API Keys & Info’.

Using the Library

To use the library I recommend that you first get a good understanding of the MailChimp API itself. You can find the documentation for this at the following URL:

View the MailChimp API Documentation

Without going into every single method (that would take days) I have included just a few of the more common scenarios below to show how the MailChimp API and CodeIgniter can be used together:

Outputting lists:

$this->load->library('mcapi');

$retval = $this->mcapi->lists();

if ($this->mcapi->errorCode){

	echo "Unable to load lists()!";
	echo "\n\tCode=".$this->mcapi->errorCode;
	echo "\n\tMsg=".$this->mcapi->errorMessage."\n";

}else{

	echo "Lists that matched:".$retval['total']."\n";
	echo "Lists returned:".sizeof($retval['data'])."\n";

	foreach ($retval['data'] as $list){
		echo "Id = ".$list['id']." - ".$list['name']."\n";
		echo "Web_id = ".$list['web_id']."\n";
		echo "\tSub = ".$list['stats']['member_count'];
		echo "\tUnsub=".$list['stats']['unsubscribe_count'];
		echo "\tCleaned=".$list['stats']['cleaned_count']."\n";
	}

}

Subscribing an email address:

$this->load->library('mcapi');

$listID = "XXXXX"; // obtained by calling lists();
$emailAddress = "email@address.com";
$retval = $this->mcapi->listSubscribe($listID, $emailAddress);

if ($this->mcapi->errorCode){

	echo "Unable to subscribe email using listSubscribe()!";
	echo "\n\tCode=".$this->mcapi->errorCode;
	echo "\n\tMsg=".$this->mcapi->errorMessage."\n";

}else{

	echo $emailAddress." added successfully\n";

}

Disclaimer: Please note that I did not write the class to calling the MailChimp API. Credit for this should go to the MailChimp developers. I have simply modified it to work within the CodeIgniter framework.

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Tags: codeigniter, mailchimp, PHP

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 15th, 2011 at 5:03 pm by Steve Marks+ and is filed under PHP, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.