Back in November 2010 MailChimp announced their 'One Million Integration Fund'. They were offering pots of money to people using their API to integrate with their product. It was early days for me and my new client working on Pianola, but we both loved MailChimp and thought it could be something that would help us out.

I was also working a lot with Orchard CMS and wanted to use it on this project. As part of building up interest in Pianola while it was being developed we created a sales site using Orchard and we wanted to be able to collect interested people’s email addresses so we could let them know how we were getting on.

So, it made sense to apply to the fund, cross our fingers and hope for the best. We did, and were surprised to find that we’d been successful. Unfortunately we didn’t get the whole million, but we did get enough to cover development of the module.

So I created a module for Orchard that will let your visitors subscribe to your MailChimp email list, letting you keep them up to date with all your exciting news. I actually finished the module quite a while ago, but I’ve been so busy with Pianola, that I’ve not had a chance to blog about it, or even install the module on my own blog.

So, if you would like to be kept up to date with all Noggin Box news then please do subscribe to my mailing list (now closed). You can get the MailChimp Orchard module here.

As MailChimp didn’t give us the whole million and they’ve shared it about a bit they’ve been able to encourage other integrations and you can find them in the MailChimp Integrations Directory. If you have any great ideas for using their API, I think they still have some of the million left.