Announcing Champagne for ExpressionEngine

Integrate ExpressionEngine (EE) with Campaign Monitor (CM), publish campaigns using new or existing content and use EE to add CM subscriber forms to your templates.

How Champagne came to life

Like all add-on’s that I’ve developed for EE thus far, Champagne was designed & built to solve a need and to simplify a process. My clients were using EE to manage web content and using CM to send e-mail campaigns. Both world-class applications and the clients were happy with these tools; however, clients campaigns were almost always comprised of content which already existed in EE.

I quickly came to the conclusion that there should be an easier way to publish campaigns to:

1. Reduce the level of effort to create campaigns that re-use existing EE content.
2. Remove the chance of clients copying a link incorrectly when creating campaigns that link to specific entries on their website.

Additionally, I was also keen on being able to use EE tags to create subscriber forms for CM.

An example use case

My client, Brett Weaver Studio, sends out a monthly newsletter campaign that includes an opening welcome message, recent paintings, upcoming events, recent blog posts. Of these four content areas of the newsletter, three of them are already managed via EE so there is no need to re-enter this content into CM. A sample newsletter.

The initial workflow for creating the newsletter was:

1. Determine the content for the monthly newsletter
2. Gather all of the URL’s & content for each item in the newsletter
3. Schedule & publish the campaign using CM’s template functionality

While this workflow isn’t that cumbersome or terrible, I knew there was a better way. Why not create a new channel and custom fields in EE to manage the newsletters. Playa came in handy for pulling in existing entry content for paintings, events and blog entries. The newsletter intro was a standard Textarea field type.

With the means to publish newsletters in EE, I needed to create EE templates to display the newsletter campaign (HTML & Text versions). I even crafted a handy plugin that comes with Champagne to convert HTML to Text. The plugin limits the characters per line to follow text email best practices.

With channels and templates built, I set forth to write the extension so that I could use Champagne to push the newsletter campaign to CM seamlessly. Many hours later I had a working product to push campaigns created in EE to CM.

The new workflow for creating the newsletter is:

1. Select & publish the content for the monthly newsletter from within EE
2. Schedule & publish the campaign via Champagne tab in the publish form

Immediate benefits from using Champagne

• Easier campaign publishing workflow.
• Reduced chance of bad links in the campaigns.
• A single publishing interface for managing web content and publishing campaigns, simplifying life for content authors.

Taking it further

While I was building the Champagne extension, I also felt it would be really nice if I could write an EE tag exp:champagne:subscribe to add CM Subscriber forms in my EE templates. The exp:champagne:subscribe tag provides complete HTML control over the form and the response presented to subscribers when they sign-up, thus maintaining visual consistency of the website and adding the subscriber to the CM subscriber list.

Learn more about Champagne

Champagne is available now. If you have a question or feature request idea for Champagne, we would love to hear it. Ideas and feature requests can be emailed to support@natural-logic.com.