Story’s MailChimp Integration Features

If you’re a blogger, you might use MailChimp to build a subscriber list, and Story makes that easy. MailChimp also has the ability to automatically send your new content to the list from an RSS feed, and guess what—Story helps you create an RSS feed customized just for that if you like, too.

First, MailChimp subscriber forms. If you want to add a subscription form at the bottom of each page, just add your MailChimp URL as a parameter in your configuration file. Here’s a YAML example for config.yaml:

params:
- mailchimp: "your URL here"

And here’s an example for config.toml:

[params]
  mailchimp = "your URL here"

You can copy the URL from the address bar of your MailChimp subscriber form. It becomes the action of the form, which will appear at the bottom of each page near your author biography.

Next, an RSS feed. Story has an RSS layout customized to create summaries of your content’s title, description, featured image, and summary content. The summary content is either delimited explicitly by the  comment in your Markdown source, or generated automatically by Hugo. (Read more here.)

The default content of the RSS feed entries is generated from the page’s description front matter and .Summary content, but you can provide your own to override this. Simply add an excerpt in the tldr front matter property.

To enable the RSS feed, you need to create a special .md file that won’t appear as regular content, but will render an extra RSS feed file. Its content is ignored, and only its front matter is important. For example, you could create it as content/mailchimp/_index.md with the following contents, using YAML front matter:

---
layout: mailchimp
outputs:
- rss
---

Now Hugo will build an extra feed at /mailchimp/index.xml, and you can use it to create RSS campaigns in MailChimp. Of course, you can also use your normal RSS feed, but Story’s default is to put full content into that, so it might be more than you want.