WordPress Forms for Relenta CRM

Relenta is a great CRM-lite which beats any mailing software I know for ease of use and speed. Highly recommended.

As you may be aware, we run almost entirely WordPress sites, although many are almost custom apps with additional functionality for real estate, insurance or political discussion. We needed a way to wed our WordPress sites to Relenta. Relenta does not have contact forms of its own but instead an email API for adding new contacts.

Fortunately John Godley’s Filled In for WordPress handles forms admirably and has a mailing function built-in. Filled In to handle the forms and Relenta to handle the lists is the best of both worlds.

But like anything technical, there are a few issues to look out for. Without further ado, here is our detailed guide to using Relenta with WordPress.

In order, these are the steps to create a form in WordPress with help of Filled In and send the information to Relenta CRM for parsing.

1. Build an HTML form compatible with Filled In and stick it into a page or post. This means that the form has to have an unique id and action should be empty string. Example:

   <form id="relenta-contact" action="" method="post">
   <input type="text" name="email" value="" />
   <input type="submit" value="Submit" />
   </form>

2. Go to the WordPress management, into Filled In page. Create new form and as name use the id “relenta-contact”.

3. Before editing options for this form, go to “Email Templates” tab. Here create a new template (name it however you want). Click on the template name to edit it. Write some subject and click on the “plain text” hyperlink located right after “HTML content:”. Now there is an “Text content” area where you need to stick the e-mail template Relenta uses to create new contact. Example:

   ### BEGIN CREATE CONTACT ###
   API_KEY: ********************************
   EMAIL: $email$
   FULL_NAME: $fname$
   JOB_TITLE:
   COMPANY:
   CONTACT_COMMENTS:
   PHONE(LABEL):
   WEBSITE(LABEL):
   MESSENGER(LABEL):
   FAX(LABEL):
   ADDRESS(LABEL):#START#
   #END#
   TEXT(LABEL):#START#
   #END#
   BLOCK NAME|PHONE(LABEL):
   GROUPS: ********
   OPTIONS: overwrite
   MATCH_BY:
   REMOVE_THIS_BLOCK: not
   ### END CREATE CONTACT ###

   Here’s how you find the API and Group IDs:
   The API_KEY can be found under My account > API tab.
   The Group IDs can be found in Contacts > Categories and groups > Edit category > Show group IDs.

4. Now go to form options (click on the form name you created in step 2). Here set 2 “Filters” (is Required for fname and email for email), 1 “Post Processors” (Send as email for Relenta) and 1″Result Processor” (Display a ‘thank-you’ message).
5. Setup “is Required” (by clicking on it) “Field” to ‘fname’ and write something nice to “Error message”. Setup “email” “Field” to ’email’ and again write something to “Error Message”.
6. Now setup “Send as email” “To” to your relenta e-mail (yourname@relenta.net) and “Template” to the name of the e-mail template you created in step 3.
7. Setting up “Display a ‘thank-you’ message” shouldn’t be a problem anymore.
8. You can of-course setup any other things you want (if you know what you are doing), but this basic form will work for you. There are a few more details on the Relenta email API itself in the Relenta manual. There are more details about setting up Filled In on the UrbanGiraffe plugin page.

Very Important Relenta/Filled In Compatibility Note

The last thing is that Filled In uses Swift PHP libraries for sending which do not work properly with Relenta’s email API (Swift PHP inserts some bad characters in the line breaks). Here is Filled In which uses PHPMailer which works with Relenta just well. SMTP and attachments are not fully tested on this version so be sure to test thoroughly before use.

In general, any form the page of which you touch or edit in any way should always be retested after saving. Forms are one of the most fragile and yet essential parts of the a website and should be managed with great care.

Enjoy WordPress and Relenta together now, a capuccino for your website.