ActsAsIcontact is an open source library that makes it easy to connect Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications with the popular iContact email marketing service. Building on the power of iContact's API, ActsAsIcontact offers three key features:
- A simple set of classes that offer transparent, "ActiveRecord"-like access to all of your iContact data from your own applications.
- A powerful command line tool to query and update iContact in real time, without writing programs.
- An adapter for Ruby on Rails that connects your own application's models with iContact contacts — updating iContact in the background when your data changes, and subscribing new people to any number of mailing lists automatically.
For more information, see the project's README file.
How to Use It
The code requires Ruby 1.9.1 or higher, and (if you're using the built-in Ruby on Rails integration) Rails 2.1 or higher. Like most reusable Ruby code, ActsAsIcontact is packaged as a Ruby gem that can be installed with a single command ("gem install acts_as_icontact").
- The installable version of the gem can be found at Rubyforge:
http://rubyforge.org/projects/actsasicontact - The source code and complete version history can be found, copied, and modified at Github:
http://github.com/SFEley/acts_as_icontact - The documentation and class reference can be found at:
http://rdoc.info/projects/SFEley/acts_as_icontact
The README file located at both the Github and RDoc sites is the primary reference for installing, configuring, and using the library.
ActsAsIcontact is licensed under an Apache 2.0 license, giving you free rights to use, modify, and redistribute the work as needed and disclaiming any warranty.
About the Author
I'm Stephen Eley. I'm the Director of Technology for the American Academy of Religion, a non-profit academic society for scholars who teach or research topics related to all forms of religion. We've been using iContact for some time to manage our member communication, and as we build out the next generation of our Web services we saw a need to find better ways to keep our member information and our iContact lists in sync. Thus, the ActsAsIcontact gem was developed first with the Rails synchronization in mind; the complete set of classes were added after I saw how easy it was to use iContact's flexible REST-based API to enable consistent updates of all services.
Despite the professional association, the code was developed entirely on my personal time and I hold all copyrights. The AAR has no ownership or liability for this library and offers no support. Please contact me if you have questions or need help.
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