Add CiviCRM Integration Script to Module

Second.

I have still to find a clean WYSIWYG solution for Civimail that would allow nontechs to create emails. Unless such an option is created soon, integration with MailChimp would be ideal.

Good idea, I'll send a heads up to them.

This thread seems to have lost any interest. I would like to reinvigorate this thread. I have been using CiviCRM to manage the membership of a rugby union club for almost twelve months and coupled with Drupal it is an excellent solution. However the CiviMail module is not that simple to use when it comes to sending HTML email. It is cumbersome and lacks features.

I agree that an integration with Mailchimp (or similar) would provide a very good solution for small to medium sized lists. Unfrotunately I am not a programmer so can only express a desire that it happen rather than being able to offer assistance.

Cheers
Martin Fuggle

I would also like to see MailChimp integrated with civiCRM. I have an existing email list at MailChimp, and I would like to start using the features of an open source CRM solution.

Like the user mfuggle above, I am not a programmer either, so unfortunately I won't be able to help, I'll just wait eagerly.

Nathan Johnson

We have been using Mailchimp with the drupal integration module and are wanting the same thing you all are wanting; to integrate CiviMail with MailChimp. I have not used CiviMail/CiviCRM yet, but a big reason for using CiviCRM/Drupal etc is to keep data centralized. Everyone has regular mailing lists so it doesn't make sense to have two different email system (donor emails and everyone else). You ideally want all this information tied together.

seems if the drupal module was altered to consider civi groups then it could not look at roles but groups to get its list.
Could branch off a civicrm version if there is interest?

Yurtboy - I think there definitely is interest - I know I would be interested in this for the charity I work for.

Deirdre,
Just trying to get a sense of why your charity chose not to use CiviMail?
For me it was a struggle with the limits hosts have on outgoing emails. And then using CiviSMTP was a bit more of a monthly costs then some
clients wanted. But recently Postmark seems to be a service that could make it easier to send mail from CiviMail and not have high limits
and monthly costs.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks

Any progress on this?

We have some hours budgeted for a project to extend the Drupal/Mailchimp module to CiviCRM. It would be great to build upon any efforts that already exist.

We have "successfully" integrated MailChimp with CiviCRM by matching CiviCRM Groups to Mailchimp interest groups. We've accomplished the following:

- CiviCRM contacts are added to a Mailchimp list when added to CiviCRM via the UI or on import if they have an email address.
- First Name, Last Name, Title, Email, and Email greeting are mapped to the same fields in Mailchimp.
- If a user is added/updated in CiviCRM to a 'group', they are added/updated in the corresponding interest group in Mailchimp along with their info.
- We've added a Mailchimp update field to CiviCRM users which displays the last sync done with Mailchimp.

Now...not to damper this news, but this code is not very clean and probably not very efficient, but it's working. There is currently no standalone or install profile. We simply hacked the mailchimp module (I know...bad practice) and manually added fields to the DB. This was done by a part time developer with little experience with Drupal or CiviCRM, so I'm sure it needs a look of work to be distributable. But, it does work.

Some caveats:

- CiviCRM groups and Mailchimp interest groups must have identical names to sync...there is no way to manually match the two together.
- CiviCRM gets the Mailchimp account and list through a hard-coded api key.
- There is no Cron integration from CiviCRM to Mailchimp, all changes are handled live.
- Cron is run once every hour to sync Mailchimp changes back to CiviCRM. This is a manual Cron setup, not included in the UI.

I'm sure there is more, but let me know if you're interested in a copy of what we have to developer it further and make it distributable. Again, it needs a LOT of cleanup work and improvements, but may give you a head start.

edit: We didn't actually hack mailchimp. The code is standalone, but there are several hardcoded items specific to our site and no install profile.

I'm interested in this Mailchimp/CiviCRM integration and in cleaning up the code. It will work with the "forever free plan" right?

Please post code or let me know how I can obtain a copy. I see that there is a separate uc_mailchimp module to integrate Ubercart and Mailchimp. Maybe it would make sense to create a separate civicrm_mailchimp project on drupal.org?

Definitely needs to be a separate project, just like the Constant Contact CiviCRM module.

The Mailchimp plan doesn't matter. We are using it with Forever Free.

I'll post it as soon as I can get my developer to pull it out of our installation.

Here is the module we created. Again, several things are hard coded such as some links to files at the top of the .module file as well as the API key on line 107 of the module file and line 126 of the cron.php.

You've got your work cut out for you on this one.

Feel free to post questions. I'll answer them the best that I can.

The database fields that we added to the module are:
Custom Fields:
last_mailchimp_update_6
newsletter_status_7
mailchimipid_8

These are added through the CIviCRM custom fields interface...those are just the field ids of them in the civicrm database

I added a table called civicrm_mailchimp_update
it has one field: last_mailchimp_update
It keeps track of the last time cron job updated the database from mailchimp...

Great! Thanks for sharing. I've created a sandbox project at d.o/sandbox/arielqgold/1104954

I will review and test the code, make it conform to coding standards, and work toward a release.

Sounds great. I'm sure there are several things that should be done differently and could be done better, but we've had it running for several weeks on a client's site and it appears to working as expected.

Thanks for this thread! I am currently doing some cleanup on mailchimpdevcivicrmcron.php and will run it from drush - once I get it working. Am I correct that this script is newer and a bit more complete than mailchimpcivicrm_dev.module?

Another question: On Mailchimp I have List1 that contains Group1 but the script exits with the error: "List1 is not in the following Mailchimp Groups: Group1" which doesn't yet make sense to me - am I doing something wrong?

And before I get much further, is there a newer version of this code? I'll post what I have once it has some semblance of functionality.

I started work on Poieo's code - thanks for posting it! - to make it more general purpose a month or so ago, but then got pulled away on another project. I expect to find time to get back to this in a month hence, but perhaps what's I've already done might help anyone else who has time/inclination to work on it. See http://drupal.org/sandbox/fen/1233314

+1 ~ I'm very interested in seeing this get committed. Have there been any updates since @fen's last post?

You can see here http://drupal.org/node/1233314/commits that there's been only the initial commit...

Yes - I had to take a couple month's rest from this project as work got in the way. But now I've got a couple weeks that I can devote to it and hopefully that will be all that is required.

I've also posted for help in the CiviCRM forums as I'd like to get all the help I can. In particular, the Drupal admin interface (I'm not a front end kinda guy) scares me a bit, as does ensuring that I handle all the various CiviCRM group creation and contact adding possibilities of which there are legion (though hopefully only a few well-defined hooks).

If anyone is available to help ensure this project gets done, I'm starting on it full-time later today.

I recently posed some updated code and am actively working on the Unsubscribe/Opt-out and Email address change issues - see http://drupal.org/sandbox/fen/1233314

Anyone interested in helping with the caching/optimization and/or an admin page for associating CiviCRM groups with Mailchimp lists (currently accomplished by exact name matching)?

Or testing. There's lot's that probably doesn't work properly yet, so patches and suggestions are welcome!

thanks for good module. i was waiting for this module last month and i have written a custom module for Mailchimp integration with CiviCRM groups for individual contact type and taking email as unique identity. this module is working fine and may need optimize and documented.
if you want any help then let me know.

@D2ev - Thanks for your contributions! I integrated some of your formapi code to enter API key and choose a Group name. But I need to match CiviCRM groups to Mailchimp Interest Lists, as my client has a very large list with segmented sub-lists for delivery. A future upgrade would enable either behavior.

Subscribing, I'm interested in this work and will be happy to test.

subscribing - also happy to test

It would be great to have this working...

It appears the integration has already been handled for us: http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimp-integrates-with-nonprofit-software-a...

Maintainers - What would it take to get this integrated into the module?

Thanks for the update Poieo. How did you find it? Were you just browsing the Mailchimp blog posts from 7 months ago? There's got to be a problem with the communication tools in the CiviCRM community if I'm only now hearing about this. :(

-Joseph

“And now our watch [for support of the 6.x version of the MailChimp module] has ended…” With the end of Drupal 6 support, I’m sad to say we too must turn the page.

Fret not! The 7.x-4.x and 8.x versions come highly recommended. Both are using Mailchimp’s new API 3.0 and are being actively maintained. “What is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger!”