How to Submit Data from a HubSpot Form to Your Joomla Website

A client of ours, who has been using HubSpot extensively for a couple of years now, asked us for something fun! He wanted to grab the contact data (when a new form was submitted in HubSpot) in order to create a Joomla user out of it. In other words, whenever someone fills out a specific HubSpot form and clicks Submit, then a new user should be created for him in the Joomla website (out of the submitted form data).

Now we did work with HubSpot a few times before, but this task was more challenging then all of our other HubSpot tasks. We spent days researching how to do this – thinking that this should be done through the HubSpot API, but not finding exactly how. It was frustrating…

But, while searching for a blindfold and a cigarette (we knew we were going to get executed if we didn’t finish this on time), we discovered webhooks. What are webhooks, we hear you ask?

Webhooks are a standard way of passing data from one application to another, easing up the integration of two or more applications. So, in short, you can use a webhook to pass (transmit) the submitted data from HubSpot to the Joomla website (or to any other website/application).

So, how did we do that?

We did it the following way:

• We logged in to the HubSpot account.

• We clicked on Contacts -> Workflows in the upper menu.

• We clicked on Create new workflow on the top right.

• We entered the workflow name (we chose “Submit to Joomla” as the name, but you can choose any other name), and we chose Standard from the popup window.

• Under “Automatically enroll contacts when they meet these criteria”, we clicked on Form Submission, and then we chose the HubSpot form that our client wanted to use to register Joomla users from the dropdown, and then we clicked on Done, and then Save.

• We hovered just over the sentence “Contacts will be enrolled the first time when they meet the criteria above. (Change)”, and, just below it, a link titled “Add action or delay” appeared.

• We clicked on the “Add action or delay” link, and we selected Trigger a webhook from the dropdown.

• We chose POST from the first dropdown (you can choose GET if you want to send the information as GET parameters to your Joomla website).

• We entered the URL of the script that we have already created that will add a user to a Joomla website based on the POST parameters¹ (we will not include the script here, but there are many snippets on the Internet on how to do this).

• We clicked on Save in order to save the webhook and the parent workflow.

• We activated the workflow by clicking on the Off button next to “Workflow is inactive. Click to review and activate.”, and then, in the popup window, we clicked on Activate workflow now, and then we clicked on OK.

• We clicked on Content -> Landing Pages in the upper menu, and then we clicked on the landing page where the form resided.

• We clicked on Edit on the top right, and then clicked on the form (this opened a sidebar to the left).

• We scrolled down on the left sidebar, and then, under Post submit actions, we clicked on Add to workflow, and then we chose the workflow that we have created above (which we called “Submit to Joomla”).

• We clicked on Update on the top right.

• We tested the landing page and we noticed that our script was getting executed when the form was filled! Success!²

If you want to automatically store the data captured by a specific HubSpot form on your Joomla website (or an any other website/application), then try using the above method. If you need help implementing it, then please contact us. Our rates are affordable, our work is professional, and we are the friendliest developers on planet Earth! (or so we say!)

Footnotes:

¹HubSpot will not send you the data in the POST headers. It will send it in the body of the headers, and there is a difference. In order to get the form data from HubSpot in your PHP script, you will need to use the following code:

$allHeadersJSon = file_get_contents('php://input');
$allHeaders = json_decode($allHeadersJSon);

$_POST will not work and will not contain any data. You have been warned!

²There is a delay of a few seconds between the form submission on HubSpot and the triggering of the webhook. Keep that in mind if your application is mission critical.