MailChimp Email Marketing Blog » Wordpress

Update to Social Plugin for WordPress

Aarron — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:00:25 +0000

We recently released a cool little WordPress plugin called Social that pulls the conversations on Twitter and Facebook about your blog into each post and makes it easy to broadcast to social channels when you publish. We were scratching our own itch. We’ve pined for a better way to handle comments on our blog, so we teamed up with our friends at Crowd Favorite to make a tailor-made solution. It turns out that we’re not alone. Ten thousand people have tried Social on their blogs too. After months of usage, we discovered a few things we could do better. Today we’re releasing Social 2.0 with a whole bunch of improvements:

A better interface to display retweets
Shows Facebook Likes
Post to Facebook pages
Import Facebook Likes
Improved threading of replies from social networks
Improved Facebook open graph search for responses
Enable broadcasting by default for new posts
Complete re-architecture and rewrite to make platform more extensible (easier to add Google+ support, when their API is released)
Enable broadcasting by default for new posts
Set which accounts (including pages) are checked by default
New queue system for checking for social comments on posts
Better support for shortened URLs
Delay broadcasting comments to social networks until they have been approved
Delay broadcasting future posts to social networks until they have been published
New authentication scheme for improved security
Smart detection of retweets as understood by humans (where possible)
Check for social comments via admin bar
Check for social comments via posts list screen
Added “time until next check” (in a human friendly format) to the social comments box for each post
Allow editing of social broadcast messages for scheduled posts
Directly imported tweets (by URL) are approved immediately (not held for moderation)
Don’t import private tweets as comments
Refactored personal vs. global broadcasting accounts, with defaults available for each
Improved admin UI

We’re pretty excited about this update as it makes a plugin that we already loved even better. Oh, and Social is open source. You can fork it on Github and make your own contributions.

download Social 2.0 for WordPress

Fork Social 2.0 on Github

Easy MailChimp list signups with the Canvas WordPress theme from WooThemes

Federico — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:50:02 +0000

I spent a few days working with the lads at WooThemes getting some MailChimp magic into one of their most popular themes, Canvas.

It turns out that a lot of their customers were asking for an easy way to add a MailChimp signup to their WordPress blogs that looked as great as the themes that WooThemes creates. As always, we’re glad to help!

The Canvas Theme settings has a “Subscribe and Connect” section that allows you to select MailChimp as a subscribe option. It’s super easy to use and doesn’t require hacking up WordPress theme files like some previous MailChimp integrations.

WooThemes has said to expect more of their themes to support MailChimp as a newsletter option in the coming future. We are looking forward to it!

Check out the Canvas theme at WooThemes

MailChimp Archive to WordPress Plugin

Ben — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 12:56:09 +0000

I’ve been running into a lot of people who are using their blog as their CMS lately, and who want to combine them with MailChimp. I usually recommend they create content in their blog, then publish it to their email list automatically via our RSS-to-email tool. Believe it or not though, there are people with valid business cases for going in the opposite direction: from MailChimp to blog. All we could do for them in the past was recommend they change their business model (not exactly an ideal pitch to customers).

Thankfully, Mark Parolisi has created a WordPress plugin for MailChimp that “fetches your campaign archives and either creates them as posts in your WP database, or just displays them live by fetching them from MailChimp upon request.”

Give it a shot and let Mark know if you find it useful. Oh, and some other WP plugins for MailChimp you might like:

WP Analytics 360 – mashes your mailchimp and website traffic into your WordPress dashboard. Shows power bloggermailers how their work is driving traffic to their site. (21,000+ downloads)
WP signup form – stick a MailChimp signup form on your WP blog. (20,000+ downloads)

Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress

Ben — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:32:16 +0000

We’ve been busy. In addition to all the new MailChimp v4.2 features we just launched, we’ve also been working with the folks at Crowdfavorite to build an awesome new (and totally free!) Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.

In a nutshell, it uses the power of Google Analytics to tell bloggers what kind of an effect they’re having on overall website traffic. We’ve made it super easy to tell if your blog posts (and email campaigns) are driving traffic to your website — it’s all embedded right in your WordPress Dashboard!

You don’t have to be a MailChimp customer to use or benefit from this plugin. But if you do happen to have a MailChimp account, we’ll mash in your MailChimp campaign stats too, giving you a bird’s eye view of the cause and effect of all your hard work.

It’s so cool that words don’t do it any justice. You need to watch this video, then download the free plugin now:

UPDATE (07/21/09): Check out this little tip on segmenting your GA blog traffic reports from our own Stephen Martin

MailChimp plugins for Drupal, WordPress, Ruby on Rails, Zen Cart

Ben — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:56:49 +0000

Ever wish there was a simple plugin that allowed you to add MailChimp’s list management and delivery power to your CMS, e-commerce cart, or blog? Some crafty MailChimp customers wished the same thing, and have used the powerful MailChimp API to create plugins for Drupal, Ruby on Rails, Zen Cart, and more. And we’ve created a “/plugins” directory to showcase their work:

http://blog.mailchimp.com/plugins/

[update: most of the Ruby on Rails "plugins" were actually API Wrappers and thus are on our API downloads page: http://blog.mailchimp.com/api/downloads/]

The latest is from Scott Wilson, aka ThatSoftwareGuy, who created a discounts plugin for Zen Cart. Pretty nifty!

Developers, if you’ve got a plugin, be sure to tell us about it. If we post your plugin, we’ll send you a Chumby as a thank-you gift.