About this guide
This development guide walks you through everything you need to do to build a high-quality React app integrated with Mailchimp and Bootstrap. Check out the tasks below to get started. To save time, you can also use our boilerplate, which gives you a complete React codebase with all of these tasks done for you. Okay, let's dive in!
Tasks
Setup your React app
Setup a React app usingnpx create-react-app
and routing using React Router. There are many ways you can structure your app, but a common setup is to have anApp
component that defines top-level routes, with each route component imported from the/pages
directory. The rest of your components should be located in your/components
directory. You can then run your app locally with thenpm run start
command.Setup a Node (Express.js) server
This stack requires server logic, so we'll be setting up a Node (Express.js) server that we can query from our React front-end. We suggest defining your Express.js routes in a file located at/api/index.js
and then creating a file for each route handler in the/api
directory. Next make sure all requests to/api/*
get routed to your Express server port by defining a proxy in yourpackage.json
. Lastly, run your server with thenode api
command in a new terminal window.Build your Mailchimp subscription form
Create an Express.js route at/api/newsletter
that receives the user's email address and adds it to your Mailchimp list using themailchimp-api-v3
library. Then create a newsletter subscribe form using Bootstrap components and have it submit the email value to/api/newsletter
. Make sure you properly validate inputs, display any errors returned by Mailchimp, and to display a confirmation message once the email has been added.Ensure Bootstrap link components hook into React Router
Make all Bootstrap link components hook into React Router by wrapping them with theLinkContainer
component from thereact-router-bootstrap
library.Create a persistent layout
Add any components that you'd like displayed across all pages (such asNavbar
andFooter
) to yourApp
component. If you need multiple persistent layouts you can instead have each page define its own layout. In that case, create multiple layout components (such asLandingPageLayout
andAdminLayout
) and wrap the contents of each page.Build out the rest of your UI using Bootstrap components and composing them into high-level page sections, such as Finish your app UI with Bootstrap
HeroSection
andAccountSettings
. Use SASS stylesheets for styling your components and overriding default component styles. You can scope each stylesheet to a single component using BEM syntax or CSS Modules.You should find our library of pre-built Bootstrap components to be helpful.
Get the code
You can get the code for this guide with our React, Mailchimp, and Bootstrap Boilerplate. You'll get a complete React codebase with Mailchimp and Bootstrap integration, all the tasks listed above done for you, and a responsive multi-page template. It should save you about two weeks of development time.
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