On the Pineco.de blog they've posted a tutorial showing how to use Guzzle to subscribe users to a Mailchimp mailing list in a Laravel application. The technique isn't specific to a Laravel application and can be adapted relatively easily for other framework/application types.

Managing users and mailing lists are not a that painful nowadays. Since we have excellent services that can cover all the needs we have, we don’t need to worry about it too much. But still, let’s take a look at how can we handle user subscriptions when Laravel fires different events.

In the tutorial, the request is sent to Mailchimp via the user registration event fired when a new user signs up for the site. They include the code to create the listener and register it in the Laravel configuration. They've also included the code that will be used when the event is fired, sending a message to the Mailchimp API with a "subscribed" status and the user information.

On the Scotch.io site today there's a new tutorial giving you the ultimate guide to sending emails in Laravel - from choosing your provider out to sending both text and HTML emails (some with attachments).

Sending emails in web applications has become so essential. Marketing, notifications, newsletters, adverts, etc are some of the reasons why we send emails to our clients. I'd say the majority of websites send automated emails at least via a "Contact us" form.

Let's explore the many possible ways to send emails in a Laravel application.

They start off with a brief look at three different services you can set up out of the box with Laravel: Mailgun (for regular sending), Mailtrap (for debugging) and Mandrill (for bulk emails). They show you how to configure each service in Laravel and setting one of them up as the default. The tutorial then gets into sending the actual emails through a simple EmailController::send endpoint. They show the code to set up the Mail. They show examples of what the resulting emails look like and how they show up in the related mail services. There's also instructions on attaching files, using queues to optimize email sending and a "bonus" about sending bulk emails with MailChimp.

The Web Development Blog has a tutorial posted showing how to add a Mailchimp "subscribe" feature to your current contact forms. They make use of the MailChimp API wrapper library to make the calls back to the service and subscribe the user at their request.

MailChimp is a great email marketing service provider with an easy to use control panel and features like: campaign management (RSS-driven, A/B Split, Plain-text and regular), statistics, auto-responder and a complete set of list management tools. They offer different ways to place a subscriber form on your website or blog. If you to like add the MailChimp subscribe feature to your existing contact form you need to add some custom code.

They start with a few things you'll need to do to prepare for the connection including the setup of an API key to make the request. He provides a simple "Contact Us" form for reference and the code needed on submit to validate the input and make the subscription call to the API with the email the user provided. He also includes a bit of response handling.

Matthew Setter has started off a series of posts on the SitePoint PHP blog with the first post interviewing community members to answer one main question, "can great apps be written in PHP?"

I read an old post, circa 2010, on the MailChimp blog a little while ago, about their experience using PHP. It struck a chord with me, because the sentiments they shared I’ve felt myself, and heard echoed many times over the years. [...] Despite its successes, or people’s successes with it (a la Facebook, MailChimp, Hailo, Google, and others), it’s inferred we should use languages which had their foundations as pure languages; not ones which came to be a language, as PHP evolved into over time.

He references some of the other comments in the Mailchimp article about their experience with the language along with mentions of a few others. He wonders if these negative comments are true and, to get some answers, searches out other developers and their opinions. In this first interview he talks with Bobby Deveaux about his background in the language, what he'd like to see added and more.

In this new tutorial to the TrueLogic.org site, they show you how to use the Mailchimp (using a library) from your application.

For those unfamiliar with Mailchimp it is an online service for handling subscribers and newsletters. It is mainly used to handle subscription lists and sending newsletters via its Mailchimp API which has wrappers and integration features for various languages/platforms. [...] In this article we will take a quick look at how to integrate this with your PHP application. If you want a detailed reference on integration then its better to look at the official API documentation. Here, we just want to give a simple and practical explanation on how to go about it.

Once you've gotten an API key, you can follow along with the tutorial. They show you how to subscribe to lists, create campaigns, unsubscribe from a list and delete a campaign.

On the Web Development Blog there's a recent post looking at the integration of the MailChimp mailing list service with your current application for list management.

MailChimp is a great mailing list provider with a great control panel and many useful features like: campaign management, statistics, responders and complete set of List management tools. They offer also an small code snippet to place a subscription form on your website. This form powered by jQuery is good enough for most common cases, but what if you like to combine your newsletter subscription with a standard function like contact or registration form?

They show you how to create the front end - a HTML form pointing to your own PHP script - and the PHP code to make a cURL request over to the MailChimp servers to subscribe the given email address to your list.