 talk a few things about MailChimp, what I learned in the last months about using MailChimp PHP libraries that are using MailChimp and Drupal integrations and what you can do. And yeah, so this is more kind of explorative talk. So no slides, I'll just gonna do a hands-on stuff, hopefully to keep everyone awake at that late hour. So MailChimp, probably some of you used it. Definitely, if you run Drupal Conference here in Australia Drupal South, we use MailChimp. So MailChimp is a, now it's called marketing service. Originally it was a mail campaign and mail-in service. So if you need to say send large amount of emails, now also personalized emails or different campaigns for different users, you can do MailChimp. It's a software as a service. So it means there is a price tag, this talk is not about actually advertising the service, but I will talk about some features of MailChimp. There is a free tier you can use up to 2000 subscribers, I think, don't quote me on that. If you're interested, click around. So it's a nice and yellow website and it basically has a couple of things. So first there's a audience and there is campaign. So your audience is your subscriber. So you can subscribe someone to your email or alternatively you can import your audience here. So at the moment I created the account, I have three contacts, which is all me and I put in different things. So it's by default, it's a simple thing like a name, last name, email, but you can also add quite a few things. You can start adding addresses, phone numbers, but you can also start also getting like categories and put your audience in categories. There are two types of categories. So there is stack, which is a flat tree and there is also like grouped categories which are called groups. There's also segments, but I'm not gonna cover them. So you can, yeah, simple. You can organize your contacts by different groups and then actually use the main service thing which is campaigns and campaigns is your email campaigns which you can create and do. So if you're using services like Vision Six is another popular one in Australia and the campaign monitor, those kind of three major one but there is more than that. I think now MailChimp is trying to lean towards different services like maybe building small websites and also CRM, Customer Relationship Management but again, you can find out more about what MailChimp offers by just going to their websites. So MailChimp has a module in Drupal and it's pretty straightforward, module itself. If you go here, it actually lists what it does. So when you install MailChimp module on you can have MailChimp lists, MailChimp sign up so it actually provides you a form with a sign up, MailChimp campaign so you can add cramp pane. And for Drupal 7 only which things that weren't migrated or MailChimp activity and MailChimp automations. So you might have heard a service called Mandrill. It's renamed now, so there is module for it as well. It's when you don't need the interface to create your campaign, you would actually need a mass email sending without your email going into spam. So you would use Mandrill which is now renamed into like mass emailing service. So, yep. And also MailChimp module for Drupal uses a MailChimp API PHP library from ThinkShout. So the last release was a couple of years ago, 2018, but yep, it's still all working. There are a couple of patches. I had, I installed the library and used it. So there are a few things that needs to be ironed out. I raised a couple of issues, but there is no communication. So maybe if anyone wants to contribute as well, working on that, feel free to pin me. I can put you in the correct direction, but here's a simple example. So actually when we enable the module, there is a whole module seed that comes with the original MailChimp. Everything just went slow, modules a lot almost. Before the MailChimp, apart from MailChimp client, all other modules are here. So there is default MailChimp, which is you put your API key generated on MailChimp. And there is audiences when you can create contacts. There is a campaign MailChimp marketing and MailChimp sign up, which is, if you can read the description, marketing is an integration with MailChimp email service and MailChimp sign up, it's sign up blocks and pages. So you can actually, if you wanna create a subscription, you put your API key, you enable MailChimp sign up. It gives you a block, you can put the block in and people can sign up to your newsletter. Simple, very similar to what campaign monitor does as well. And you can go to MailChimp service and you can actually modify your templates. But what module provide is creating the template? Oh no, don't copy my key. There you go. So MailChimp campaign, it doesn't sync back. So if you reinstall it, there's gonna be nothing here. Everything's gonna be wiped. It also has a link to a campaigns. So if we go to a campaign here, we can see the list of our campaigns, which is, as I mentioned before, just a list of your newsletters. So it has links to the audience and here's the newsletters I created. So if I'll go back to my MailChimp and try to create MailChimp campaign, we'll get a form, that's not the year. So there are a few fields to fill. It also trying to, so it gets the audience from the actual MailChimp service and based on your selected audience, it also has which audience tags you wanna, target or do you wanna send it to everyone? From meetup b, you can select the template or you can generate the content from here. How you can preview it. So what it's gonna do, it's gonna reverse the page and show you the HTML. How it, which is pretty simple. On the bottom here, email example content, simple and we can click same as draft. So as I said, the module didn't, get a bit of love. So there were a few things introduced in MailChimp and it crashed. So it's actually, again, the library working with Gazel and it's not handling some of the errors. So the error, if you refresh this page, it'll actually say this email look dodgy. So admin.example.com actually looks dodgy. So MailChimp is like, I don't like this email I'm not gonna create and this not being handled by either module or a library. So again, it's a bit of love, but if I'll put my email in, like save as a draft, it created, you can see the error now and that's the error I was mentioned about. So it says, this email looks like a fake or invalid. Please check it. So if we'll go to our campaigns and the refresher list of campaigns, we should see our meetup for October 2020. Campaign is there, it sits in draft and you can actually now start editing your campaign. So again, we have the text here go, like the power of MailChimp in my perspective comes from editing templates. It has nice, this wheezy wheezy type editor, which you can go and modify stuff in. So while it's loading, I'll show you some examples. So there is a video here that actually shows that here's your design, you click on it, you drag the block, can enable the preview mode, you can drag your RSS items. Is there any chance to make the fire? Is it better? Yes, yes, thank you, it was, that's great, thank you. So yeah, you have a block, it's probably loaded now, so we can, where did it go? So here we go, because we actually placed it here, it gives us just an example in MailContent, but here's Mail Studio, which you can go and add other stuff. We can also choose which template and use one of the templates. So again, select the basic layout, and then as I showed you in the video, it gives you an ability to drag and drop some stuff. So apart from that, like that's all your standard, you can click on it, edit, you have a WYSIWYG editor, and you can come here and add some stuff in. The interesting bit comes where it actually, it's called merge tags, but it's a variable, so you can actually use specific variables that user provided in the form that you created in here, making it personalized. The simple email is the first name, last name, so you can, hello, Vladimir, this is the mail specifically for you. So that's all kind of cool. Another cool thing I found is RSS integration. So as you can see here, if we go back to our campaigns, go MailChimp, go back to the campaigns, as you can see the campaign we created, it's a standard campaign. So you shoot it once and off it goes, and then you see the statistics, how many people click on it, how many people view it, did anyone follow the links, standard marketing stuff. But the interesting bit is there is also RSS campaigns, which module doesn't have integration with yet. So an RSS campaign is here, and what it can do, it can read your RSS feed from your website. For example, daily, and people can subscribe to it, and daily it would say if there is a change in RSS feed for the last 24 hours, so it can be daily, monthly, weekly, it would shoot them in the mail saying here's the updates, and you can modify your RSS feed based on the variables and this article. So you can actually use something like feed block, description, URL, and all that. So you can provide URL for your feed, a specific category, and put it in here. So again, there is documentation on MailChimp site, but I found it fascinating. But as I said, there is no integration with RSS campaign in the existing MailChimp module. I dig a bit more around the internet about MailChimp, and I found that they actually start doing their own libraries. In fact, they created libraries for JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, and Python. So now it looks like there was a bit of a rebranding, so there's a big list of APIs you can do. And they call it MailChimp marketing PHP. So I thought, oh, that's interesting, that may be worth exploring, and maybe package it as a different module because it uses different library, and there is all these new tools that kind of might be completely different from the vision of original module creators. One of them would be maybe syncing the tags between taxonomy terms and the actual tags in MailChimp. Another one actually creating this RSS periodic feeds from within Drupal, and then going to MailChimp, or integration with RSS feed from the views. RSS feed would go and create a template straight away for you, so you don't have to go and do it all manually. So I created the placeholder module called MailChimp marketing. I'll probably post a few things about it, so if you feel like you have a spare hour or two, if you wanna contribute, I'll probably be doing some work on it in the next couple of months. So if you're interested in learning a bit of module development, jump on this page or pin me. And yeah, that's kind of a short talk about what MailChimp is, what some of the features are. Two libraries I listed again, so ThinkShout MailChimp API, which used by MailChimp module. So this MailChimp module, it's available for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. There is a number of issues, but as I said, there's not many responses, so I would like if anyone knows, anyone who is responsible for these modules, let me know. I don't mind helping them releasing it and doing a more updated version. And also, as I said, there is a new PHP library, my MailChimp on GitHub, and I created a placeholder module called MailChimp marketing. What I also started doing while creating this MailChimp marketing, I started updating the MailChimp marketing APIs with the examples of PHP because some of those things get a bit complicated when you pin the APIs. So I started putting the examples and it's at the moment sitting currently on my GitHub. So if you feel like digging the some PHP code is not your thing, but you would like to contribute a bit to the documentation again. It's all out there in GitHub. In main, see if you're interested in, especially if you are using the MailChimp library.