Interspire Email Marketer (IEM), in my opinion, is the best newsletter system on the market that can be downloaded and installed on your own server. At least, I cannot find any other that comes close to it’s features, and I have looked hard. It does have one drawback though, and that’s the system API does not support integrating it into third party applications so subscribers can update their newsletter preferences from within another system. Interspire stated they don’t provide support on technical aspects of the API, so I have had to create my own API functions until they realise the benefit of this and write one themselves. This blog gives you a quick overview of the files to edit.
Integrating Interspire Email Marketer into a Third Party System
Firstly I have to say I needed help with this. Unfortunately Interspire took a long time to respond with the answer “we do not provide technical support for customization, integration, or the API“! Not only a long response time, but with no help on what is a comparatively expensive system for small businesses (the price has more than doubled since last year). So with a few days over the weekend and missing all this great sun :( I have written my own functions :) I initially realised there is no UpdateSubscriber function within the API, and so had to create my own. I now have a third party system (Zencart Shopping Cart) in which account holders can view their newsletter subscriptions and change them such us subscribe or unsubscribe. This will then automatically update the IEM newsletter system. Not only that, if a subscriber changes their email address, or actual address and telephone numbers, then these are also updated in IEM. FANTASTIC! Otherwise customers would need to login to two systems to change details… that’s not good, and is asking for trouble. So now I have an excellent newsletter system that subscribers can manage their data from with a third party system. Yes, I know this should be straightforward and standard you say, which is why my clients of course asked me to do it, but very surprisingly this was not built into IEM. The code is too much to go into detail here, only that the following files need updating, based on other functions:-- /xml.php
- /admin/functions/api/subscribers.php
- xml.php - case ‘updatesubscriber’ was created to action an UpdateSubscriber call in the XML data passed to IEM
- subscribers.php – function UpdateSubscriberCustomField() was created to update the Custom fields you have created. This in turn calls a few other functions already there such as UpdateEmailAddress() and ChangeSubscriberFormat().