MailChimp OAuth2 library for Django | Hacker News Reader

MailChimp OAuth2 library for Django

github.com

28 pointskennethlove6 comments

A little library I put together over the weekend for MailChimp's new OAuth2 offering. Lets your users authenticate against MailChimp and you get back their credintials so you can create a user or whatever.

Super-simple but it works.

Demo app here: https://github.com/kennethlove/Django-MailChimp-OAuth2

I know what Mailchimp, Django and OAuth2 are, but I'm struggling to understand the purpose of this library. Can you shed a bit of light on how or where this might be used?

Sure. Say you're building an app that leverages MailChimp's platform for sending emails. Someone that uses MailChimp could come sign up for your app using their MailChimp account, which would be validated through this library and the OAuth2 provider (MailChimp) and you'd know they were a real user and you'd have API keys to make calls on their behalf.

So now they can use their account and your app and everything is hunky dory.

I know that's pretty general and all, but that's how you'd use it. MailChimp is trying to move away from API keys and all that 'messy' authentication and toward OAuth2.

Gotcha. So this app is for authenticating account holders of the Mailchimp product, not for authenticating subscribers in your Mailchimp account. That's where my confusion was.

I do a lot of development with Django and MailChimp, but most of it is for implementations against a particular account -- so it's a lot easier just to stick the API key in a settings file and skip the OAuth stuff.

Do many users sign up for MailChimp accounts? I thought they were a mass mailer/newsletter company.

I can't really answer that since I don't work for MailChimp.

The OAuth2 service is aimed at people building apps for people that use MailChimp, not people that subscribe to a mailing list hosted on MailChimp.

Like how you'd use Twitter's OAuth2 service to build apps for people that use Twitter, not those that just read feeds.

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