My First Rails Plugin
Well, now that we are wrapping up the final details of our new website, and have pushed it into production, I can get back to blogging more reliably. More importantly, after a nearly 10 month development cycle I have plenty to blog about, such as my first Rails plugin.
That's right, I wrote a plugin for Rails called actsasmailchimp that will easily allow a Rails application to interact with Mail Chimp, which is an email service provider. Installation is as simple as typing:
script/plugin install git://github.com/bgetting/acts_as_mailchimp.git
Once installed, you can begin interacting with the Mail Chimp API from your application, although the plugin is not a complete wrapper and has limited functionality. For me, the reason for writing it was to help other developers that may be facing the challenges that I was facing:
- Adding email addresses to the Mail Chimp mailing list when an account is created (and the user opts in to a newsletter.)
- Removing email addresses from the Mail Chimp mailing list when a user requests it.
- Ensuring that the mailing list at Mail Chimp and the Rails application database stay in sync.
There is much more documentation in the ReadMe file of the plugin, or on the repository page at Github. If anyone decides to use the plugin, I'd love to hear feedback and, of course, suggestions on making it better.
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