Announcing the release of Champagne 2

Completely re-written for ExpressionEngine 2 and utilizes the new REST style API from Campaign Monitor.

Overview

If you aren’t familiar with the original Champagne add-on, here are a couple brief points to get you up to speed:

• Allows you to publish Campaign Monitor campaigns from within ExpressionEngine. Campaigns can be completely new content or leverage content already stored in EE.
• Use EE tags to build subscriber forms for your site and control the look and feel when subscribers join your list(s).

What’s New?

• Streamlined publishing interface. We used the general publishing model from the Campaign Monitor web application to maintain consistency and usability.
• You can now send campaign test previews directly from the publish form! Additionally, you can send campaigns immediately or schedule the campaign for a future date.
• Easily set the name or subject for a campaign to the entry title or enter unique text for both.
• Subscriber forms can now have selectable lists.
• Extension Settings improvements for specifying channel templates for campaigns.
• We’ve added a handy exp:champagne:countries tag for populating Country field’s on subscriber forms.
• Included with Champagne 2 are example template code for rendering your campaigns as well as several examples of subscriber forms.
• Also included is the handy HTML to Text Email plugin, reworked for EE 2 as well.

Taking it further

We want to add more features and functionality to Champagne 2. We’re committed to further development based on your input and needs. Let us know if there are particular features you would like to see built into Champagne 2 (e.g. support for webhooks, list management via the EE control panel, etc).

Why make Champagne 2 a separate product from Champagne 1?

The decision to make Champagne 2 a separate product from the previous version was based on a number of reasons:

• Champagne 2 is a complete rewrite. We had to rewrite it because the hooks used in version 1 don’t exist any longer and Campaign Monitor recently released a much improved API.
• Since Champagne 2 is completely new, the functionality and documentation are fairly different from the previous version. It did not make sense to try and maintain these two distinct products in one package.

Can I upgrade from Champagne 1?

We are not offering free upgrades from Champagne 1. Previously, we have given free upgrades for our other add-ons (Geofinder and Geotagger); because it made sense from the functionality side of things. However, the same was not true for Champagne 2.

If you have purchased Champagne 1 in the last 30 days and would like to switch your license to Champagne 2, please get in touch. Please let us know if you purchased at Natural Logic or Devot:ee.

We spend a lot of time on development and support for our add-on’s. We also take great pride in providing top-notch support and development to our customers.

Go forth and learn more

Check out the new Champagne 2 page with screenshots and more feature explanations. We also invite you to read through the documentation. Let us know if you have any questions!

Many thanks to the kind folks who helped us with testing and Michelle Myers, of Locomotion Creative, for listening to my ideas and providing honest, relevant feedback.