The first 2 months of 2021 have been focused heavily on finishing up some major plugin updates. One of those was a major overhaul of the MailChimp Integration extension.
Up until now, the extension was really a “one-way” street, passing data to MailChimp via its API. The 2.1 update incorporates a much needed change to allow two-way passing of data between the two to make this a much better overall application.
This is done by the inclusion of webhooks support. Enabling webhooks will allow your application to keep user data in sync between MailChimp and WP-Members, no matter which site the user changes their data on. This is for subscription status, user email changes, as well as any mapped merge fields and interest group data.
Yes, interest group data – that’s also new. There was support previously for mapping interest group data, but it had to be done through filter hooks. Now it is incorporated into the plugin. One important note is that you need to make sure your field values match the possible values in MailChimp, just like you do for merge fields. I’ve included some information in the documentation on this.
I have also incorporated WP CLI support for the extension. It currently allows you to view subscription information between the site and MailChimp (which shows you if you have data out of sync). It allows you to subscribe/unsubscribe users and also to view specific user data from MailChimp. I’ll be expanding this in future releases to provide full sync for new site setups and maintenance via command line, which is far more efficient that doing large batches in the browser.
This version also includes some additional features that may not be as noticeable. First, there’s a filter view in the Users > All Users screen for subscribers. Second, if you view a user’s profile, you’ll be provided some MailChimp data on the user (if they are subscribed) at the bottom of the profile. This is added to the WP-Members user tabs.
Also, this version includes a bug fix if you use WooCommerce. There previously had been an issue when used with WooCommerce and WP-Members Memberships for WooCommerce where a user could be unsubscribed when renewing their membership. This update includes a bug fix for this issue.