gibbon

Gibbon is a simple wrapper for MailChimp's Primary and Export APIs.

##Important Notes About Version 0.4.0+

Ruby 1.9.x+
Errors are now raised by default
Timeouts can be specified per request during initialization
The environment variable 'MC_API_KEY' no longer works. Please use 'MAILCHIMP_API_KEY' instead.
The code has been cleaned up a bit and a few more comments have been added

##Installation

$ gem install gibbon

##Requirements

A MailChimp account and API key. You can see your API keys here.

##Usage

There are a few ways to use Gibbon:

You can create an instance of the API wrapper:

gb = Gibbon.new("your_api_key")

You can set api_key, timeout and throws_exceptions globally:

Gibbon.api_key = "your_api_key"
Gibbon.timeout = 15
Gibbon.throws_exceptions = false

For example, you could set the values above in an initializer file in your Rails app (e.g. your_app/config/initializers/gibbon.rb).

Assuming you've set an api_key on Gibbon, you can conveniently make API calls on the class itself:

Gibbon.lists

You can also set the environment variable MAILCHIMP_API_KEY and Gibbon will use it when you create an instance:

u = Gibbon.new

Note: In an effort to simplify Gibbon, the environment variable 'MC_API_KEY' is no longer available as of version 0.4.0. Please use 'MAILCHIMP_API_KEY' instead.

Fetching data is as simple as calling API methods directly on the wrapper object. The API calls may be made with either camelcase or underscore separated formatting as you see in the "More Advanced Examples" section below.

Check the API documentation for details.

Fetching Campaigns

For example, to fetch your first 100 campaigns (page 0):

campaigns = gb.campaigns({:start => 0, :limit => 100})

Fetching Lists

Similarly, to fetch your first 100 lists:

lists = gb.lists({:start => 0, :limit=> 100})

Or, to fetch a list by name:

list = gb.lists({:filters => {:list_name => list_name}})

More Advanced Examples

Getting batch member information for subscribers looks like this:

info = gb.list_member_info({:id => list_id, :email_address => email_array})

info = gb.listMemberInfo({:id => list_id, :email_address => email_array})

List subscribers for a list:

gb.list_members({:id => list_id})

List unsubscribed members for a list

gb.list_members({:id => list_id, :status => "unsubscribed"})

Subscribe a member to a list:

gb.list_subscribe({:id => list_id, :email_address => "email_address", :merge_vars => {:FNAME => "First Name", :LNAME => "Last Name"}})

Note: This will send a welcome email to the new subscriber

Batch subscribe members to a list:

gb.list_batch_subscribe(:id => list_id, :batch => [{:EMAIL => "email1", :FNAME => "FirstName1", :LNAME => "LastName1"},{:EMAIL => "email2", :FNAME => "FirstName2", :LNAME => "LastName2"}])

Note: This will send welcome emails to the new subscribers

Fetch open and click detail for recipients of a particular campaign:

email_stats = gb.campaign_email_stats_aim({:cid => campaign_id, :email_address => email_array})

email_stats = gb.campaignEmailStatsAIM({:cid => campaign_id, :email_address => email_array})

Setting timeouts

Gibbon defaults to a 30 second timeout. You can optionally set your own timeout (in seconds) like so:

gb = Gibbon.new("your_api_key", {:timeout => 5})

	gb.timeout = 5

Error handling

By default Gibbon will attempt to raise errors returned by the API automatically.

If you set the throws_exceptions boolean attribute to false, for a given instance, then Gibbon will not raise exceptions. This allows you to handle errors manually. The APIs will return a Hash with two keys "errors", a string containing some textual information about the error, and "code", the numeric code of the error.

Note: In an effort to make Gibbon easier to use, errors are raised automatically as of version 0.4.0.

Export API usage

In addition to the primary API, you can make calls to the Export API using an instance of GibbonExport. Given an existing instance of Gibbon, you can request a new GibbonExporter object:

g = Gibbon.new("your_api_key")
gibbon_export = g.get_exporter

or you can construct a new object directly:

gibbon_export = GibbonExport.new("your_api_key")

Calling Export API functions is identical to making standard API calls but the return value is an Enumerator which loops over the lines returned from the Export API. This is because the data returned from the Export API is a stream of JSON objects rather than a single JSON array.

##Thanks

The following people have contributed to Gibbon's development in some way:

##Copyright

MailChimp (c) 2001-2012 The Rocket Science Group.