How do you use the Gibbon Gem to automatically add subscribers to specific interest groups in MailChimp?

Question

I'm trying to figure out how I can use the Gibbon gem in Rails to automatically add subscribers to specific interest groups in MailChimp?

I've found this article which details a non-Rails method for doing so: http://roman.tao.at/uncategorized/mailchimp-api-listsubscribe-listbatchsubscribe-and-groups/

I'd like to figure out how to implement that functionality using the Gibbon gem: https://github.com/amro/gibbon

FYI, I'm also a novice with both MailChimp and Rails.

Answer 1

Finally, after hours of perusing through code. I've found the example I'm looking for!

Thanks to TJ Moretto for providing this on a Google Groups thread:

I'm using the gibbon gem, but ran into the same types of issues. Here's how I had to format the parameters to finally get this to work:

gb.list_subscribe({:id => "#{list.id}",
                   :email_address => user.email,
                   :update_existing => true,
                   :double_optin => false,
                   :send_welcome => false,
                   :merge_vars => {'FNAME' => "#{user.first_name}",
                                   'LNAME' => "#{user.last_name}",
                                   'GROUPINGS' => {0 => {'id' => grouping.id, 'groups' => "#{challenge.name}"}}}
                  })

Hope that helps.

Mailchimp Team - based on the number of issues that everyone runs into when trying to do this (across all programming languages), I suggest you update the API documentation to be more clear.

Answer 2

Update for version 2.0 of the MailChimp API and version 1.0 of Gibbon (For @Calin and posterity). Here are the necessary changes from the previous version. The API object is accessed like this now:

gb = Gibbon::API.new

And list methods like so:

gb.lists.subscribe(params)

Finally the :email_address parameter has been replaced by the :email parameter, which should be given a value of the following form: The value should itself be a hash with one key, either 'email' or 'leid', and the value should be either the email address of the subscriber or MC's unique identifier (LEID) for the subscriber.

So a full subscription call might look something like this:

gb = Gibbon::API.new
gb.lists.subscribe(:id => "ed6d1dfef4",
                   :email => 
                     { "email" => "[email protected]" },
                   :merge_vars =>
                     {:groupings =>
                       {
                         0 => { :id => "95", :groups => ["Some Group", "Another Group"]},
                         1 => { :id => "34", :groups => ["A Third Group"]}
                       }
                     },
                    :update_existing => "true",
                    :double_optin => "false",
                    :replace_interests => "false")