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Tuesday’s Tip: An easier Infusionsoft PHP SDK
This week I’ve created a screencast in addition to the normal write-up. It’s my first time screencasting, so please be gentle! If you want to do really powerful things with Infusionsoft then you’ll need to use the API. Infusionsoft provides a PHP SDK that is used by a lot of developers. It’s free, powerful, and has a fair amount of documentation. Unfortunately it also has a few issues that developers frequently encounter (such as random blank responses from the API or error messages), and has a bit of a learning curve. At Novak Solutions we’ve developed a new and improved Infusionsoft PHP SDK. It is completely free, and we use it for all of our products so you know it’ll be maintained in the future. It has a few features that we feel make it easy to use and better than the official SDK: No dependencies. If your server has PHP and cURL, then you are good to go! Code completion. We’ve added all the necessary PHPDoc comments so code completion will work in popular editors, like Eclipse and PhpStorm. Automatically retries. Automatically retries failed API calls when it is safe to do so (i.e., updates and deletes, but not inserts). Automatically handles XML-RPC. Your requests and responses are automatically encoded and decoded. We’ve included a custom version of the XML-RPC code that automatically works around a few bugs in the Infusionsoft API. Automatically picks the right method. Saving records is easier. The SDK will automatically pick whether to do an insert or an update based on whether you are working with a new or existing record. Future safe! The SDK...Tuesday’s Tip: Validate Infusionsoft forms BEFORE submission
Infusionsoft web forms are incredibly powerful. With a bit of dragging and dropping you can build an attractive page to collect whatever information you need from your customers and leads. Web forms aren’t perfect though. They are missing a crucial piece of any modern form: client-side validation. This type of validation occurs before your lead submits the form. For example, if you have a required email field but the user leaves it blank, the client-side validation would display an error message letting them know what is missing. This all happens without a page load and without clearing the form. You can even get more advanced, such as requiring a minimum number of characters to be entered in a field, or making sure they put a valid email address in the email field. Luckily for us, it isn’t too hard to add validation into your form. This is a bit more advanced than some of our other tips, but feel free to leave a comment or email us if you need help. For this tip we are going to use the extremely popular jQuery Validation plugin. It’s free and flexible, and works well with Infusionsoft web forms. You can validate just about anything, such as: postal codes, phone numbers, dates, URLs, and even VIN numbers. The documentation has a list of available validation methods. To get started, you’ll need to add an HTML snippet to your web form and add some code to it. This code will add the validation functionality to your form, turn it on, and set the validation rules. For example: <script src="https://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.validate/1.11.1/jquery.validate.min.js"></script> <script src="https://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.validate/1.11.1/additional-methods.min.js"></script> <script> jQuery(document).ready(function() {...Tuesday’s Tip: Custom titles for Infusionsoft order forms
By default, Infusionsoft order forms—and even the shopping cart—are missing a page title. Instead of something nice, like Event Registration (Basic) – Novak Solutions, the visitor will see an ugly URL in the titlebar. You can see this tip in action on our demo order form. Like most of our tips, the fix for this is very easy. All you need to do is add a title tag to your custom header HTML area for either your order form or your shopping cart theme. For example: <title>Event Registration (Basic) - Novak Solutions</title> Of course, for your shopping cart you’ll want something a little more generic, perhaps just your company name. The custom header HTML isn’t actually in the header, so this fix isn’t standards compliant. Your title tag is going to be thrown into a random spot in the body of the page, but fortunately all the major browsers go ahead and display the title properly anyway. Got an idea for a tip? Wish Infusionsoft did something it doesn’t? Let us know and we’ll try to help in the next Tuesday’s...Tuesday’s Tip: Auto-format phone numbers on Infusionsoft forms
An easy way to encourage accurate phone number entry is to automatically format phone numbers as they are typed in. This is called a masked input, and is very easy to implement in Infusionsoft web forms, order forms, and the shopping cart. To see an example, check out the order page for our Easy API product. We’re going to be using the jQuery Masked Input plugin. We’ve thrown a copy up on our server that you can use, or you can download it and save it to your own server. The code is the same for both order forms and the shopping cart: <script src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/novaksolutions/free/jquery.maskedinput.min.js"></script> <script> jQuery(document).ready(function() { jQuery("#phoneNumber").mask("(999) 999-9999"); }); </script> To use this code, simply paste into your Custom Header for your order form or shopping cart. It is a little different for web forms: <script src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/novaksolutions/free/jquery.maskedinput.min.js"></script> <script> jQuery(document).ready(function() { jQuery("#inf_field_Phone1").mask("(999) 999-9999"); }); </script> To use the code for a web form, you’ll need to add an HTML snippet. Copy and paste the above code into the HTML snippet. There is a caveat: With the way the code is written above, the user won’t be able to enter more than 10 digits. If you need more than 10 digits or want the phone number formatted for different countries, you’ll need to use a different mask. Check the jQuery Masked Input plugin page for instructions on how to do this. You can also easily modify this code to work for other fields that you may be collecting, such as social security numbers and...
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