How do I implement a MailChimp API form embed? - php

Question

sorry for the perhaps naive question, but I have absolutely 0 experience in web design and I've been plowing through .html/.css for 2 days straight, and I think it's time I just seek some help.
I'm making a simple landing page for a conference, and I've been using a few templates. The most recent template I'm using is perfect, except the email signup sends direct emails to my account, rather than creating a list using a service such as mailchimp - highly inefficient.
A previous template I tried out, however, did implement mailchimp, and I was wondering how I might just grab its code and throw it in the current template I have.
Here is the subscribe.php from the mailchimp template:
<?php
$apiKey = '';
$listId = '';
$double_optin=true;
$send_welcome=true;
$email_type = 'html';
$email = $_POST['email'];
//replace us2 with your actual datacenter
$submit_url = "http://us1.api.mailchimp.com/1.3/?method=listSubscribe";
$data = array(
'email_address'=>$email,
'apikey'=>$apiKey,
'id' => $listId,
'double_optin' => $double_optin,
'send_welcome' => $send_welcome,
'email_type' => $email_type
);
$payload = json_encode($data);
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $submit_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, urlencode($payload));
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
$data = json_decode($result);
if ($data->error){
echo $data->error;
} else {
echo "Thanks! We'll keep you updated on the conference :)";
}
?>
and here is the snippet of code in index.html:
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-6 col-sm-12 col-md-offset-3 subscribe">
<form class="form-horizontal" role="form" action="subscribe.php" id="subscribeForm" method="POST">
<div class="form-group">
<div class="col-md-7 col-sm-6 col-sm-offset-1 col-md-offset-0">
<input class="form-control input-lg" name="email" type="email" id="address" placeholder="Enter your email" data-validate="validate(required, email)" required="required">
</div>
<div class="col-md-5 col-sm-4">
<button type="submit" class="btn btn-success btn-lg">SIGN UP TO BE NOTIFIED</button>
</div>
</div>
</form>
<span id="result" class="alertMsg"></span> </div>
</div>
For reference, here are the subscribe.php and index.html snippets from the non-mailchimp template:
Subscribe.php
<?php
if ( isset( $_POST['newsletter_submit'] ) ) {
// Initialize error array
$newsletter_errors = array();
// Check email input field
if ( trim( $_POST['newsletter_email'] ) === '' )
$newsletter_errors[] = 'Email address is required';
elseif ( !preg_match( "/^[_\.0-9a-zA-Z-]+#([0-9a-zA-Z][0-9a-zA-Z-]+\.)+[a-zA-Z] {2,4}$/i", trim( $_POST['newsletter_email'] ) ) )
$newsletter_errors[] = 'Email address is not valid';
else
$newsletter_email = trim( $_POST['newsletter_email'] );
// Send email if no input errors
if ( empty( $newsletter_errors ) ) {
$email_to = "register#neustep.org"; // Change to your own email address
$subject = "NeuSTEP Subscription";
$body = "Subscriber details: " . $newsletter_email . "\r\n";
mail( $email_to, $subject, $body, $headers );
echo 'Thank you for subscribing!';
} else {
echo 'Please go back and correct the following errors:<br />';
foreach ( $newsletter_errors as $error ) {
echo $error . '<br />';
}}}
?>
Index.html snippet
<div class="newsletter">
<form action="subscribe.php" method="post" id="newsletter-form">
<p class="form-field">
<label for="newsletter_email" class="visually-hidden">Your email address</label>
<i class="icon ion-paper-airplane" aria-hidden="true"></i>
<input type="text" name="newsletter_email" id="newsletter_email" value="" placeholder="Your email address" />
</p>
<p class="form-submit">
<input type="submit" name="newsletter_submit" id="newsletter_submit" value="Get Notified" />
</p>
</form>
</div>
thanks for helping! sorry for the long post. I'm not sure what the etiquette on stackoverflow is, so if i'm asking a crappy question, let me know.

Answer 1

Your form is ok, and you need to implement a handler for subscribing like;
subscribe.php
<?php
if (empty($_POST["newsletter_email"]) {
die("You should provide email!");
} else if (!preg_match( "/^[_\.0-9a-zA-Z-]+#([0-9a-zA-Z][0-9a-zA-Z-]+\.)+[a-zA-Z] {2,4}$/i", trim( $_POST['newsletter_email'] ) )) {
die("Email address is not valid!");
} else {
$newsletter_email = trim( $_POST['newsletter_email'] );
}
$apiKey = '';
$listId = '';
$double_optin=true;
$send_welcome=true;
$email_type = 'html';
$email = $newsletter_email;
//replace us2 with your actual datacenter
$submit_url = "http://us1.api.mailchimp.com/1.3/?method=listSubscribe";
$data = array(
'email_address'=>$email,
'apikey'=>$apiKey,
'id' => $listId,
'double_optin' => $double_optin,
'send_welcome' => $send_welcome,
'email_type' => $email_type
);
$payload = json_encode($data);
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $submit_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, urlencode($payload));
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
$data = json_decode($result);
if ($data->error){
echo $data->error;
} else {
echo "Thanks! We'll keep you updated on the conference :)";
}
?>