Salesforce form integration (web-to-lead) with PHP and cURL

In the example below I am only showing the basic process. I am leaving out the validation code for the fields and any submission code to MySQL database.

One security advantage of this process is hiding your organisation id within a variable in the submission page rather than on the live page with the form.

// SF Org Id.
$oid = "0113543434646";

I first check if cURL is enabled before processing any further.

// Make sure cURL is enabled
if (!function_exists('curl_init')) {
	error("Curl is not setup on this PHP server and is
    required for this script");
}

I then loop through all the data input from the form. I first check there is data there (twice). Then I loop through each POST data using a foreach. Within the foreach loop I run stripslashes()function to stop the backslashes getting added twice. I don’t do any other form of validation as the data is going to Salesforce and I rely on them checking the data. At the end I add the organisation to the array.

if (isset($_POST)) {

if (count($_POST) == 0) exit("Error.  No data was passed
     to this script.");

// variable to hold cleaned up a version of $_POST data
$cleanPOST = array();	

// Loop through the $_POST data and process it
foreach ($_POST as $key=>$value){
 $cleanPOST[stripslashes($key)] = stripslashes($value);
}

// Add the Org ID
$cleanPOST["oid"] = $oid;

} else {
 exit("Error.  No data was passed to this script.");
}

Once the POST data is in an array we can send it to Salesforce. I have commented each step below. I add a return URL to the data sent which then redirects the user to that URL. You could do the redirect in the PHP file itself.

// Create a new cURL resource
$ch = curl_init();	

if (curl_error($ch) != "") {
    echo "Error: $errorn";
}

// Point to the Salesforce Web to Lead page
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,
"http://www.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.WebToLead");

// Set the method to POST
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);

// Pass POST data
curl_setopt(
$ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($cleanPOST));

curl_exec($ch); // Post to Salesforce
curl_close($ch); // close cURL resource