CODEWITHSUNDEEP
if-statementrssconditional-statementsmailchimp
halbe
halbe

Reputation: 21

MailChimp: How to use conditional logic with RSS feeds

I have searched MailChimp's documentation as well as other sites but cannot seem to figure out how to use both conditional merge tag blocks with |FEED| merge tags.

Basically I am wanting to combine the two in order to include posts from multiple blogs in my e-mail campaign; in particular, I would like to use conditional logic so that any RSS feeds evaluated as "empty" (meaning no new items) receive alternative content that says something along the lines of "no updates available."

I have tried to come up with a few ways of doing this - none have been successful, but here's the type of thing I had in mind:

*|FEEDBLOCK:http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/feed/|*
*|FEED:TITLE|*
*|IF:FEED:POSTS[$content=full] != |*
*|FEED:POSTS[$count=3,$content=titles]|*
*|ELSE:|*
no updates available for this feed
*|END:IF|*
*|END:FEEDBLOCK|*

any help would be appreciated.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3079

Answers (2)

skladany
skladany

Reputation: 170

Well, this question is from ages ago, but I had a similar problem and figured out a (really hacky) work-around...

Assumptions:

1. You're using a (very) custom RSS feed
2. You're overriding the default RSS tags with custom content

In my use case, I'm using the <category> RSS tag, which MailChimp reads in via the *FEEDITEM:CATEGORY* merge tag. I'm using this as a subheading for my RSS feed, instead.

If that subheading is filled out in the admin (that is, whatever admin system you're using to spit out the RSS feed), I want to include it in the feed -- but I also need to add in more html for the email template. The solution is including the required html in the RSS feed. (Like I said -- hacky.)

Shockingly, this works. Mailchimp dutifully pulls in all the html/css.

The RSS feed (vastily simplied here) looks something like this:

<channel>
    <item>
        <category><![CDATA[ <table><td><tr><div class="example">Sub Headline</div></tr></td> ]]></category>
    </item>
<channel>

If that field is not set in my custom admin, then no <category> tags at all are outputted, and MailChimp simply ignores that merge tag.

So basically, any email HTML code that you want to display only if the merge tag is valid, should show up in the feed itself.

Definitely not ideal, but it works.

YMMV...

Upvotes: 1

Tim Bunch
Tim Bunch

Reputation: 86

MailChimp is still very limited with it's conditional tags, which are limited to subscriber data. RSS feed conditions would be a welcome addition.

http://blog.mailchimp.com/conditional-dynamic-content-in-mailchimp/

Upvotes: 0

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