How to use TriggerSend with an existing e-mail template? Php Coding

Question

I am having trouble figuring out how to do the following;

Lets say I have a customer that comes to our site, and buys two of our products. They provide their email, first name, and last name.

And lets say in my exact target account, I have created a template in the following location;

Content > My Templates > PetShop > new_order_template

After they sign up, I want to update my subscribers list

After that, I want to select the template new_order_template, and populate it with the appropriate data.

Lets say this is what I have for data

$email = '[email protected]';
$first = 'hello';
$last = 'world';
$product = array(
    array('name'=>'frog','sku'=>'FOG12','price'=>5),
    array('name'=>'duck','sku'=>'DUK12','price'=>3),        
);

Could some please help me figure how I would do this in PHP using the Web API.

I would greatly appreciate the help.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Within ExactTarget Email, a template object very basic skeleton that is used to create an email object. An email can be created off a template or it can be created without a template by providing all the HTML. The Email is the final object that is used for sending which would contain all of the content and personalization values.

For example, the body of the email may contain a reference to a profile attribute which is used to hold first name using %%first%%, then when the email is sent to a subscriber it will pull the value of the "first" profile attribute and place it there when it builds the email.

If using the TriggeredSend functionality for adhoc emails, then a Triggered Send definition would need to be created which references the Email object so it know what content to send, then the API request would reference this definition using the CustomerKey(External Key) value along with send specific information.

One thing to note based on your sample, it contains an array which is not a supported data type for subscriber attributes. This data could be stored in ExactTarget in a Data Extension which could be leveraged at send time using AMPscript or the values could be stored as XML which would need to be parsed using AMPScript in order to display them in an email.

Get setup for using PHP with the SOAP API: http://help.exacttarget.com/en/technical_library/web_service_guide/getting_started_developers_and_the_exacttarget_api/connecting_to_the_api_using_php/

Example code for triggering an email: http://help.exacttarget.com/en/technical_library/web_service_guide/technical_articles/send_triggeredsend_email/