How We Integrated Joomla’s “Email this Link to a Friend” with HubSpot

Note: This integration consists of a core override. As usual, please keep in mind that core overrides can lead to stability issues and can be wiped out with a future Joomla update.

A client of ours asked us to integrate Joomla’s “Email this Link to a Friend” (or “Send Article to a Friend”) with HubSpot. What they wanted to do was to add the person sending the article as well as the person receiving it as contacts. As you already know, when someone sends an article to a friend, he is asked to fill in his name, his email, and his friend’s email. So, in other words, we will have the name and the email of the first contact (the person who sends the article), while we will have only the email of the second contact (the person who receives the article).

The first thing that we did was creating the form in HubSpot. The form contained 3 fields: “Email”, “First Name”, and “Last Name”. The internal field names for those fields were “email”, “firstname”, and “lastname”, respectively. Only the email was set to required. Once we created the form, we clicked on the Embed tab on the left, and we saw the following in the textarea just under Copy the snippet below onto your site:

<!--[if lte IE 8]>
<script charset="utf-8" type="text/javascript" src="//js.hsforms.net/forms/v2-legacy.js"></script>
<![endif]-->
<script charset="utf-8" type="text/javascript" src="//js.hsforms.net/forms/v2.js"></script>
<script>
  hbspt.forms.create({ 
    portalId: '111111',
    formId: '1a1a1a1a-2b2b-3c3c-4d4d-5f5f5f5f5f5f'
  });
</script>

We then took note of the value of portalId (which was 111111) and formId (which was 1a1a1a1a-2b2b-3c3c-4d4d-5f5f5f5f5f5f) in the code above. (Note: These are not the real values and you should replace portalId and formId with your form’s values).

After creating the form and taking note of the values of portalId and formId, we moved over to the fun stuff: it was time for sending the contacts from the Send Article to a Friend Joomla form to HubSpot. So, we opened the file controller.php which is located under the components/com_mailto folder, and we added the following function at the very beginning of the MailtoController class:

private function addToHubSpot($email, $name=''){
  //note - you will need to replace "111111" with your portalId, and you will need to replace "1a1a1a1a-2b2b-3c3c-4d4d-5f5f5f5f5f5f" with your formId.
  $url = 'https://forms.hubspot.com/uploads/form/v2/111111/1a1a1a1a-2b2b-3c3c-4d4d-5f5f5f5f5f5f';

  $pageURL = JUri::current();
  $pageName = "Send Article to a Friend";
  
  $name = trim($name);
  if (!empty($name)){
    $arrName = explode(' ', $name);
    if (count($arrName) > 0){
      $firstname  = $arrName[0];
      array_shift($arrName);
      $lastname = implode(' ', $arrName);
    }
    else{
      $firstname = $arrName[0];
      $lastname = $arrName[0];
    }
  }
  
  $fields = array(
    'firstname' => $firstname,
    'lastname' => $lastname,
    'email' => $email
  );
  $strFields = http_build_query($fields);

  jimport('joomla.user.helper');
  $randomPassword = JUserHelper::genRandomPassword(32);
  
  $hsContext = array(
      "hutk" => $randomPassword,
      "ipAddress" => "192.168.1.12", 
      "pageUrl" => $pageURL,
      "pageName" => $pageName
  );
  $strContext = json_encode($hsContext);
  $strContext = urlencode($strContext);
  $strFields = $strFields.'&hs_context='.$strContext;
  
  $ch = curl_init($url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $strFields);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 2); //wait a maximum of 2 seconds
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
      'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded'
  ));  
  $result = curl_exec($ch);
}

Then, just before $this->display(); near the very end, we added the following code:

//add the sender to HubSpot
$this->addToHubSpot($from, $sender);
//now add the person receiving the email only if it is different than the person sending the email
if ($from != $email){
  $this->addToHubSpot($email, '');
}

As you can see in the above code, we are only adding the receiver's email if the email of the person sending it is different from that of the receiver. This is because many people send articles to themselves.

Now, after doing the above, we filled in an "Email this Link to a Friend" form, and to our pleasant surprise, it worked as it should: it made 2 form submissions in HubSpot and created 2 contacts! Hooray!

We hope that you enjoyed this post. If you need help with this integration or with any HubSpot integration on your Joomla website, then please contact us. We have implemented many HubSpot integrations on many Joomla websites, our fees are super affordable, and our work is super clean!