Franky,

Thanks for your response. I think I figured out the issue I posted about. I had not set the scope. Mailchimp also wants the Feed to begin with http instead of feed or it will be an invalid RSS feed.

When I changed this:

feed://www.rotaryclubofessex.com/?eme_rss=main&scope=future&order=ASC&category=&author=&contact_person=&limit=1

To this:

http://www.rotaryclubofessex.com/?eme_rss=main&scope=All&order=ASC&category=&author=&contact_person=&limit=1

I now get only the last event published in the RSS feed as I wanted.

I’m still working on the RSS feed to Mailchimp though, it shows up great in the preview, but the campaign didn’t trip last night and send out the announcement.

I know you don’t want the events to be posted as posts and I’m guessing that this is what Mailchimp is looking for, a new post. I was hoping to have the RSS to Campaign feature of Mailchimp send out this email based on adding a new event. e.g. if it saw a new event in the event RSS feed, it would trigger a mailing.

Any ideas on where to start looking?

Thanks,

JP

By the way, I think this plugin is great. It is really going to make automating my club’s email notifications/newsletters a lot more automated! Thanks!

Posting this to anyone trying to integrate with MailChimp:

I was able to get this working by fixing the RSS feed – MailChimp was testing to see if the feed Validated and it didn’t.

So, I pasted my feeds address here http://feedvalidator.org

This will tell you if the feed validates and if not, why not.

The one simple fix to get it to validate was this:

open the eme_events.php file in the plugin’s folder

scroll down to line 3453 and look for this line:

echo “<categories>$categories</categories>n”;

change it to:

echo “<category>$categories</category>n”;

(the RSS spec is looking for a “category” tag, not “categories”)

There were still other errors in the validation, but none that prevented the RSS feed from validating.

So, I was able to set up the RSS feed as above – it lists only the last event created/edited. MailChimp’s RSS to email campaign now will look for this feed daily and send out any new events to the list of my choice.

This does allow for an email to be sent to my users, but it is not the real solution I want. The reason is, sometime we enter events on the calendar months in advance. So, the most recent event entered isn’t the next upcoming event. The email we send out asks members to RSVP for the next upcoming event. If we enter an event that is far in the future, we’re not reminding the users to rsvp for the next upcoming event…..

Thinking out loud: I’m wondering if I can use the scope argument in the RSS feed to limit the feed based on a date. The problem with that is, MailChimp’s RSS to email campaign only triggers when there is a new/edited event. I guess we could enter events as necessary, then, as a final step, edit the next upcoming event, making it the last event edited. The only problem with doing that is that we’ll end up spamming the members for RSVP’s!