anna.morris's blog
Just another FSFE Fellowship Blogs site
Using a CC mailchimp template in PHPlist Hosted
There is a bit of a hole out in Free Software Land – no one is providing a hosted mail-shot service WITH glossy, tested, templates ready to use for us less-code-savy people. Since the launch of PHPlist Hosted, I have been staring at an empty html editor thinking – “start from scratch – yeah, right….” but refusing to send out some lame text-only ugly thing. I also refuse to use a nasty spying proprietary service…. so I have done nothing for a while!
Turns out that not-very-free mega-site mailchimp have released some creative commons (CC-Atribution-ShareAlike) templates – which, other than being full of mailchimp specific hooks etc, are quite serviceable and said to be well tested. I have spend a few hours trying to fit them into my phphosted templates system and found that its not too hard. Here is my first intelligible attempt :
The phplist placeholder system is really simple to use and the main body of the email is edited in a sort of WYSIWYG based on the code you paste in: you just need to replace the text and images, which is nice. As long as everything is the right dimension and you have the right number of stories, the more complex mailchimp code (that makes the template flexible to your needs) is irrelevant anyway. It’s just the social media buttons etc that are a bit messy so far.
Anyway, looking forward to getting a glossy design done in time for a Christmas mail-out – and will of course share-alike once I am done!!
!!If anyone else would like to spend a day making these templates phplist ready with me, I would be happy to sprint on this to get this vital service sorted fast!!
Best
Anna