Warning: This post is for API junkies and Cocoa developers. If that’s not you, feel free to move along—but be sure to tell your developer friends that MailChimp’s got something new for them.
I bet you’re working on the next highest grossing iPhone or iPad app, aren’t you? Are you using MailChimp to keep in touch with the people who download your app? You should be! Now you can integrate MailChimp functionality, like list subscription, into your iPhone or iPad apps in a few simple steps. I’m excited to announce that we’ve completed work on the initial release of ChimpKit.
What’s ChimpKit?
- Sample subscribe form used with CKDialogController
ChimpKit is an objective-c wrapper for the MailChimp API (developed by Chris Burnett). We’ve given it a home on GitHub and welcome any feedback and/or contributions. All of the API functionality is tucked into a few classes to help you get started.
- CKList: managing lists, including interest groups and subscriptions
- CKCampaign: managing campaigns
- CKHelperMethods: miscellaneous tasks like retrieving ChimpChatter and account details
If you’re familiar with our API, you might have experienced a bit of déjà vu in that class list.
ChimpKit is built on ASIHTTPRequest by All-Seeing Interactive. That means no heavy lifting when talking with a web server. And with ASIHTTPRequest you get a few bells and whistles, like access to progress delegates, cookie support and an easy look at response headers.
To get started, just drop the ChimpKit directory into your XCode project. There’s a pre-built signup controller (CKDialogController) you can use to add signup functionality into your app with almost zero coding. Just set your API Key and List ID and you’re good to go.
And to my Android friends, we’re a few days from releasing something for you as well.
This looks awesome! When I try to copy the files into an existing Xcode project, however, /i get a message that the files cannot be copied. Any ideas what I might be doing wrong? Thanks!!
Just talked to our Mobile Lab and it sounds like the easiest thing to do is open both projects in XCode, yours and ChimpKit. Then, drag the ChimpKit group from the ChimpKit project window to your project window. You’ll be asked if you want to copy the files over, which we suggest doing.
Thanks, Stephen! For whatever reason, I still get a “cannot copy” error message when I try. I’ll try using standard webview and html signup form for my current project, but will look into ChimpKit again later on!
Hello,
I have the same problem. It always gives and error when copying, its annoying. I solved it dragging the folder inside Xcode but not copying the files. My program compiles and run but it gives the error I reported with JSON.
Hello,
I am trying to integrate the wrapper into a app.I am trying to execute the provided project to test it before integrate on our app.
I changed the API keys and the list ID and runs it on the 4.0 simulator. After introduce the email the console gives the following error:
2010-10-08 10:08:13.403 ChimpKit[13425:207] fooo
2010-10-08 10:08:16.114 ChimpKit[13425:207] -JSONValue failed. Error trace is: (
“Error Domain=org.brautaset.JSON.ErrorDomain Code=4 \”Valid fragment, but not JSON\” UserInfo=0x5e12f50 {NSLocalizedDescription=Valid fragment, but not JSON}”
)
Can you tell me something about this?
Congratulations and Thank you very much for give us a really nice email platform.
Javier
Hi Javier,
Sorry you had trouble. Could you git pull the latest and try again? You’ll notice that ChimpKit now passes the request back in both the failure and success cases. This way you can get the response string directly and parse if the response is JSON (in some cases our API returns “true” or other keywords such as on successful listSubscribe. You shouldn’t see that JSON parser warning anymore.
Thanks,
Amro
Yes, now works
.
Thank you very much.