Blog: New Features & Updates

A big happy new year to everyone! Hopefully you bought the new year in with a bang and are sporting decent headaches like most of the Freshview team. To get the ball rolling on a big new year at our end, we've just pushed a range of new API kits live for those of you getting your hands dirty with the Campaign Monitor API, including:

• 5 new PHP samples - including 2 using PHP4 and the NuSOAP libraries, 2 using the built in PHP5 SOAP classes and 1 illustrating how you can use a simple POST request to make a call to the API using the CURL libraries.
• A simple ASP sample - just a basic POST of a SOAP envelope to the API, with the appropriate headers included.
• A Perl sample - using Perl's SOAP::Lite. A big thanks to Leon Breedt for sending us in this script.

These kits should provide a nice kick-start for integrating your Campaign Monitor account into your own applications. If you have any other development environments you'd like an API sample for, or have one of your own you'd like to contribute please let us know.

When we overhauled our custom field support back in February, we made the decision to cap the maximum number of custom fields to five (which we explained here). Over the last ten or so months, the ability to support more than five custom fields has been one of the most requested new features we've had. Ever. Now that we're successfully purring away on our new hardware, we figured it's time to double the number of custom fields you can have from 5 to 10. Hopefully that makes things a little easier for those of you who need to store a little more information on each subscriber.

In a continued push to support as many languages as possible, we've just pushed a small update live that improves our support for foreign characters in your campaign subject line. This update ensures all Asian character sets like Chinese, Japanese and Korean are fully supported. As usual, we're using UTF-8 encoding for both the subject and campaign content. As you can imagine, it can be difficult to test all the different language variations out there, so if you ever spot a discrepancy, please let us know and we'll continue making tweaks and improvements to make sure everyone's covered.

When we initially built delivery scheduling into Campaign Monitor, we basically locked your recipients for that campaign until it was delivered at the time you set.

Our main reasoning behind this was that we charge based on the number of recipients, and if more subscribers joined your list after the campaign was scheduled, we'd charge you more than we quoted. Well, it turns out that's not an issue at all, and we've had plenty of requests to allow these new subscribers to receive the campaign too.

As of today, any new subscribers that join a list that a campaign is scheduled to go to will receive that scheduled campaign, even if they subscriber after the campaign is scheduled (but before it's sent). This might involve us charging a few more cents than originally quoted, but it means your new subscribers don't miss out on the action.

A while back we made it easy for you to create custom fields with multiple pre-defined options. Let's say you have a field for interests. You can easily populate that with options like surfing, reading, movies, baseball, etc. Once you've created your custom fields, it's easy to create a subscribe form for your site that captures what your subscribers are interested in.

All good so far, but it's when you actually try and import multiple value data that things would start getting ugly. From today, we've made it very easy to import and export your multiple value custom field data using double pipe characters as a divider. Using my previous example, here's how data might look like for me when you import your data from a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file.

Name, Email, Interests, Country
David Greiner, me@email.com, Surfing||Movies||Reading, Australia

By separating all your multiple options with a double pipe, we make it super easy to import your subscriber data and marry it up with the custom fields in your subscriber lists. We use the same formatting when you export your data as well, making it easy to export, make any changes you want and re-import back into the same or other lists.