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 Material UI. 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 Material UI 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 Material UI link components hook into React Router
Make all Material UI link components hook into React Router by using thecomponent
prop and setting the value toLink
fromreact-router-dom
.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.Add a Material UI ThemeProvider
Add the Material UIThemeProvider
component so that you customize theme values. If your entire app uses the same theme (as opposed to different nested themes), then the best way to do this is update yourApp
component so thatThemeProvider
wraps all your pages.To support Add dark mode supportdark mode you'll need to define a light and dark Material UI theme object, read the user's preference from local storage on mount, fall back to their browser default using
prefers-color-scheme
, and pass the correct theme object toThemeProvider
. You'll also want to create auseDarkMode
React hook that any component can call to get/toggle the user's preference. Be sure to check out our example Material UI components with dark mode toggle.Build out the rest of your UI using Material UI components and composing them into high-level page sections, such as Finish your app UI with Material UI
HeroSection
andAccountSettings
. Use Material UI's CSS-in-JS solution for styling your components and overriding default component styles. You should find our library of pre-built Material UI components to be helpful.
Get the code
You can get the code for this guide with our React, Mailchimp, and Material UI Boilerplate. You'll get a complete React codebase with Mailchimp and Material UI 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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