Update user’s first_name, last_name and email on a WordPress website when the appropriate MailChimp data has been changed

If you are interested in an opposite process – how to sync MailChimp lists with changes on your website, I recommend to look at my plugin.

Creating a webhook

First of all go to your MailChimp dashboard to create a webhook that will be fired when somebody has updated his profile or changed his email (check checkboxes Profile updates and Email changed).

Creating a webhook that processes two events at the same time – profile update and email changed.
What sources to set depends directly on your purpose, but in the common cases it is enough to set “By a subscriber”.

As you can see, we have a single webhook for both events. If this step seems unclear for you, or maybe you would like to create a webhook with MailChimp API, I recommend to check this tutorial first.

Update a user on your WordPress website

Even if you are not so familiar with the code, no problems – all you have to do is to insert this ready-to-use piece of code to your (child) theme functions.php. Just in case you changed the webhook URL above, do it here as well.


add_action( 'init', 'misha_profile_and_email_update_webhook');
 
function misha_profile_and_email_update_webhook(){

	// exit the function in case it is not our hook
	if( empty( $_GET['process-webhook'] ) || empty( $_POST['type'] ) || $_GET['process-webhook'] != 'anything' )
		return;

	$event_type = $_POST['type'];
	
	switch( $event_type ) :
		case 'profile':
		
			// we need it because we have to get a User ID somehow
			$user = get_user_by( 'email', $_POST['data']['email'] );

			wp_update_user( array( 
				'ID' => $user->ID, 
				'first_name' => $_POST['data']['merges']['FNAME'],
				'last_name' => $_POST['data']['merges']['LNAME'],
				'display_name' => $_POST['data']['merges']['FNAME'] . ' ' . $_POST['data']['merges']['LNAME'] 
			) );

			// you can also use update_post_meta() by the wa
			//update_user_meta( $user->ID, 'first_name', $_POST['data']['merges']['FNAME'] );
			
		die;
		case 'upemail':

			$user = get_user_by( 'email', $_POST['data']['old_email'] );

			wp_update_user( array( 
				'ID' => $user->ID, 
				'user_email' => $_POST['data']['new_email']
			) );
		
		die;
	endswitch;

}

I replaced break with die on lines 27 and 37 because we do not have to do anything else (load a website page 😱) once the appropriated to a certain webhook code is fired.

#MailChimp
Misha Rudrastyh

Misha Rudrastyh

I develop websites since 2008, so it is total of 14 years of experience, oh my gosh. Most of all I love love love to create websites with WordPress and Gutenberg, some ideas and thoughts I share throughout my blog.

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