Our Mailchimp Ruby Gem - Hominid v.2.0.4

Mailchimp recently released a whole bunch of new features, and also have updated their API to version 1.2.5 to include some of these new features. So we’ve updated the Hominid gem to include some of the new methods that are available.

For those of you that are not familiar with the Hominid gem, it is an open-source Ruby gem that provides a wrapper for the Mailchimp API. In other words, Hominid makes it easy to connect and interact with Mailchimp via their API using the Ruby programming language. The newest version of Hominid adds the following new features:

EcommAddOrder

This method is a bit redundant, but allows you to submit ecommerce order information to the API without having the Ecommerce 360 variables available to you. In other words, you can submit an order without referencing a campaign, and also by only having the email address. This is a nice feature, as it lets you report any order data, and also will make it so that the email address associated with the order doesn’t have to subscribed to a list. Here’s a couple of reasons why that is cool:

When someone completes an order using a different email address than the one that is subscribed to your lists. In this case, the correct email address will be associated with that order, where with campaignEcommAddOrder the email address is looked up from an ID that is passed.

When you have order data to report that is not associated with a campaign. As I’ve been told by Mailchimp, if there is a campaign ID available to you, you should use campaignEcommAddOrder. However, if there is not a campaign ID available to you, you can still report the order to Mailchimp by associating it with the email address using ecommAddOrder.

Also, you can include the campaign ID with ecommAddOrder, in case that will help out as well.

GeoOpens

This method introduces the Geolocation feature of Mailchimp into the API. You can get a list of the countries that a campaign has been opened in, and from there you can drill down to the regions within that country using another new method- campaignGeoOpensForCountry. We expect that there will be quite a few new additions to the API as all of the new features find their way in, such as TimeWarp.

EepURL Stats

Mailchimp has added a method that will let you retrieve all the tweets and retweets on Twitter that include your campaign’s EepURL. In other words, you can see how many people were tweeting about your email campaign.

Chimp Chatter

Hey, they offer it as a method, so we include it in the gem. This one is fun, and let’s you retrieve all the Chimp Chatter for your Mailchimp account.

The Hominid gem is available at Gemcutter, and is the foundation of Chimpified, a service we have created that connects Shopify stores with Mailchimp.

Published by Brian Getting on Wednesday, February 17, 2010.
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