MailChimp’s signup forms are already pre-translated to a few dozen languages. But some of our users want the ability to manually translate each piece of the process in their own way. So in v6.3, we did that. When you go in to your list’s form designer, you’ll notice a new “Translate” tab:
It’s that time again, folks: we’ve added more templates for this month’s v6.3 release. 21 new templates, to be exact.
Here’s what we’ve got for you:
While we’ve added another healthy batch of general-use newsletter templates, I think the big blip on the radar here is the expansion of our non-profit category, with easier-to-use, more stable templates.
If you’ve been browsing the web on an iPhone or iPad, you’re probably used to seeing, well – not seeing a few things. That’s because Apple intentionally left out support for Flash on their mobile devices. Their reasoning for this omission was that many of the new standards that web browsers currently support provide much, if not all of the same functionality that Flash does without the need for a third-party plugin.
These new standards, often referred to as HTML5, are indeed the future of the web. They provide new markup and rules that specify how browsers should store data, play media files and present content. All of these changes promise to help make the old, static HTML of yesteryear more friendly for living, breathing web applications (like MailChimp) that we’ve been building for the web.
That all might sound like rainbows and unicorns, but some things are were much easier to do in Flash. Building an animated, data-driven charting library was one of those things. In fact, up until this week’s release, most of the pie, line and bar charts seen in the MailChimp application were displayed in Flash using the versatile amCharts library.
Earlier this year, amCharts released an entirely new JavaScript/HTML5 library that offered much of the same functionality without the need for Flash. The UX Team set up a little demo, duplicating a couple of our existing Flash charts with the new Javascript/HTML5 library. When Ben saw that they even animated in, his response echoed our own sentiments, “Boingy, iPhone friendly charts. Hallelujah!“
We’ll be launching v6.3 tomorrow morning (Monday, 9/12/11). The changes will propagate to all 900k+ user accounts by end of day Tuesday.
Some really cool updates to announce, plus one big policy change…
Every once in a while we get complaints from customers who want to run really complex segmentation criteria in MailChimp, but they keep bumping into our segmentation limitations. Truth is, we put those limits in place to keep a handful of customers from destroying our servers for the 900k other users on the system. Some of their queries could really turn our databases into a hairball of a mess. To get around those limitations, we’ve seen customers create multiple MailChimp accounts, open up separate tabs to run more segments, and all kinds of crazy hairbally stuff that would make our servers choke.
So we created Hairball. It’s an Air app that you install on your computer, and it syncs with your MailChimp list. Then, you can GO NUTS building all kinds of segments with your list. When you’re done, you sync it back up to MailChimp.