Zoho Lead Component for Joomla 1.7 - User Guide

Zoho Lead Component for Joomla 1.7User’s Guide

Copyright Notice

© 2011 by Webify Soluções Computacionais LTDAAll rights reserved

Subject to the following, copyright in this document belongs to Webify Soluções Computacionais LTDA.

Except as expressly permitted or by applicable law, you may not, in any form, distribute, transmit, re-transmit, broadcast, modify, or otherwise make available or communicate to the public any part of this document or in any other way exploit commercially all or any part of this document without our prior written permission.

Please check copyright notices on or in respect of individual Third Party software or document referenced in this document.

You may print or save one copy of any page of this document for your own use.

A COMPONENT FOR JOOMLA AND ZOHO CRM USERS DOCUMENT REVISION 1.3

PAGE 2 OF 33 HTTPS://WWW.THECODER.ORG

Table of Contents

Objective 4

Component Release History 5

Document Revision History 5

Requirements 6

Installation and Upgrade 7

Zoho CRM Setup 9

Zoho Lead Component Setup 14

See it in Action 24

Changing Form Definition 28

Using CAPTCHA 29

Known Issues 32



Zoho Lead ComponentUser’s Guide

Objective

This software is intended to work as a bridge between a Joomla site and a Zoho CRM platform. The contact form of a Joomla site can be used to automatically create a lead in a Zoho CRM account. Zoho CRM has a feature to generate HTML code to include a form in a web site, where the submission of this form is sent to Zoho CRM, creating what is called “Lead”. The administrator of the Zoho CRM account is notified by email from Zoho system and can start working the lead.

The form generated by Zoho CRM comes with very basic styling and in most cases is different from the styling used by the Joomla template installed. The function of this component is to give users the ability to create a form with any fields from their Zoho CRM account, including custom fields, and use this form on their contact page having control on the style used.

Zoho CRM offers free and paid accounts. This components works with both types of accounts.

The main advantages of this component can be summarized as:

1. Easy setup: the configuration is straight forward, basically a copy-paste-save flow in Joomla administrator’s interface;

2. Full Integration: the component uses the contacts entries from the core Joomla Contacts component, there is no need to add contact information twice. The administrator continue to manage the contact’s data using the core Joomla Contacts interface;

3. Homogeneous Styling: the component replaces the Zoho styling with nice built-in styles or a customized CSS class, keeping the contact’s page visually homogenous with the rest of the site;

4. Notifications: administrators can be notified by email when a new lead is generated from web. This is useful mainly for users of a free account of Zoho CRM. This kind of account does not provide this functionality;

5. Protection against bots: the use of a captcha system is optional. A plugin to enable this feature is provided together with the main component;

6. Auto Registration: the email and user name can be used to automatically register user on Joomla database;

7. Flexibility: it works for Web-to-Lead, Web-to-Contact and Web-to-Case forms of Zoho CRM.



Component Release History

Component Release Date Major Changes

1.5.0 April, 2011 Initial Release

1.5.1 June, 2011 Support for Captcha

1.5.2 June, 2011 Fix for Magic Quotes Off

1.7.0 November, 2011 Native Version fo Joomla 1.7

and New Features

Document Revision History

Document Revision Date Major Changes

1.0 April, 2011 Initial Revision

1.1 June, 2011 Use of Captcha

1.2 June, 2011 Release History Update

1.3 November, 2011 Update for Joomla 1.7



Requirements

This software requires:

‣ Joomla 1.7.x;

‣ PHP 5.x;

‣ MySQL Server 5.x;

‣ cURL extension enabled;

‣ Zoho CRM account (www.zoho.com).



http://www.zoho.com

http://www.zoho.com

Installation and UpgradeThe installation procedure follows the default method of installation of any Joomla add-on. To upgrade to a new version of the component, just install the new package without uninstalling the current installed version. This will preserve the configuration data.

1. After downloading the package, extract the j17_zl17_UNZIPMEFIRST.zip file to a local folder. The package contains:

‣ The component installation file: com_zoholead.zip;

‣ The captcha plugin installation file: plg_zoholead_enmask.zip; and

‣ This User’s Guide, in PDF format: Zoho Lead User Guide.pdf.

2. Open the Joomla administrator interface and log in as a Super Administrator user.



3. Go to Extensions->Extension Manager. On the Upload Package File frame, click Choose File button. Navigate to the folder where you extracted the com_zoholead.zip file and select it. Click Upload & Install button.

4. The following message should appear, indicating a successful installation. If any errors message is returned, verify the directory permissions on the Joomla folders and retry the installation.



Zoho CRM SetupThe configuration starts on the Zoho CRM account. On the Zoho CRM interface, the administrator creates a web form, selecting the fields that should be used on the contact form. These fields will populate the lead’s entry in Zoho CRM.

The following are exclusively tasks related to Zoho CRM configuration of a Web-To-Lead Form. Jump to the next section if interested only in the Joomla setup tasks.

1. Log in to the Zoho CRM account and click on Setup menu entry.

2. On the setup page, click on the Web-To-Lead Form link.



3. On the next page, click Create New Form button.

4. This will open Web-To-Leads Form setup page. This page is too long to show it in one shot. See below the first section to work with: Form Properties. Enter the name to the form and your domain name. Fill Return URL field with the domain name, as the returning page is managed from component setup, which is covered in next section.



5. Scroll down a little bit and the second configuration section should be visible: Fields Selection. Select all the fields that need to be included on the web contact form. On this list, any custom fields previously created on Zoho CRM will be available and can be selected. It is important to check Email, Fisrt Name and Last Name, if you want to use the Auto Registration feature of Zoho Lead Component.

6. On next section, enable the checkbox if the leads coming from web must be validated manually before entering the Leads queue. We won’t use this option on this demonstration.



7. Following section allows the set up of an auto response email to the user after contact form has been submitted. A Email Template need to be previously created, and selected on the drop-down list.

8. The option below is only available when integration with Google Apps is enabled. On this section, Publish Form, the Embed this form in my sites option MUST be chosen.

9. Click Save & Next button.



10. After saving the setup, the Result section should provide a text box with the HTML code. Keep this window opened. It will be used on our next procedure.

All the steps above refer to Zoho CRM configuration of a Web-To-Lead Form. They are provided here for the purpose of completeness, although they are not part of the configuration of the Zoho Lead Component.



Zoho Lead Component Setup

This section describes the Zoho Lead Component setup procedure.

1. Still on the Zoho CRM Web-To-Lead Form page, Result frame, select all the HTML code generated and copy it to the clipboard using the CTRL-C or ⌘-C combination, depending on the operational system used, or through the browser’s menu Edit->Copy.

2. Log in as a Super Administrator on the Joomla administrator’s interface.



3. Go to menu Components->Zoho Lead->Import Zoho Form menu.

4. On the Zoho Lead Manager page, click on the empty text area. Be sure that the cursor is blinking inside it.



5. Paste the HTML code on the text area, and click the Upload Zoho Form button.

6. The resulting page says if the form was processed with success. This does not mean there is no errors on the HTML code. If the copied code on the clipboard was not complete, the form may have some processing errors. The form processed with success message means the code was uploaded and parsed with success by the component.



7. Create, from Content->Article Manager menu, an article in Joomla content to be the Thank-You page. This page will be loaded after user submits the contact form.

8. Open Components->Zoho Lead->Preferences.



9. On Zoho Lead Preferences page, click Select/Change button to see the list of articles available in Joomla content.

10. Browse the entries until you find the Thank-You article created in step 7. Click to select it.



11. (Optional) Enable Auto Registration to have an user created for each contact submission. The system uses First Name and Last Name to generate the Name of user in Joomla. The User Name (login) will be the Email field filled on the contact form. The system will generated a random password and email it to the user.

12. (Optional) Enable Notifications and inform email addresses on the appropriate field. Addresses must be separated by commas, without spaces.



13. (Optional) Choose a style from the dropdown list or choose Custom and inform your CSS class name for a form object on the Custom Class field.

14. Click Save & Close to apply the configuration and close the Preferences page.



15. Now, the contact page must be changed, if it exists, to point to Zoho Lead Component instead of the core Contacts Component, or created if this page does not exist. This is usually a menu item. The picture below shows a menu item being created. Create a new menu item and select Zoho Lead -> Single Contact as the menu type.



16. The title must be provided, for example: Contact Us. The contact to show on the Contact Us page is selected from the drop-down list at right. These contact entries are created and managed using the core Contacts Component of Joomla.

17. Save it and make sure it is published.



18. Verify the menu item appears on the web page.



See it in Action

This section shows the component in action.

1. Click the Contact Us menu item. The form with the Zoho CRM fields is loaded. Fill in the fields with information and click Send button. The picture below shows the form created in the step 5 of the Zoho CRM Setup section.

2. The Thank-You page is loaded to the user.



3. On Zoho CRM, the lead is automatically created or queued for approval, according to the configuration on step 6 of Zoho CRM Setup section. This step assumes that leads are accepted without need for approval. Check the Leads list.

4. The picture below shows lead details.



5. The user receives an automatic response by email. This email is sent from Zoho CRM (see step 7 of Zoho CRM Setup section).

6. If Notification is enabled, a message is sent from Zoho Lead Component to the email addresses informed in Preferences.

7.



8. If Auto Registration is enabled, you should see a new user on Joomla. The Joomla’s registration policy is enforced, such as default user group, admin approval and/or email verification by the user. However, note that passwords are always randomly generated and sent to the user by the component.

9. Follow the same procedure of Zoho CRM Setup section to define a Web-to-Contact or Web-to-Case integration with Joomla. You only need to find the appropriate link on the Setup page of Zoho CRM interface.



Changing Form Definition

If changes to the Zoho form is need, follow steps 1-6 of the Zoho Lead Component Setup section of this User’s Guide.



Using CAPTCHA

This section details the procedure to enable the use of Captcha on the form presented to the user. With this component, a modified version of the EnMask Captcha Plugin is provided. More information about the original version of this plugin can be found at http://enmask.com. The support for Zoho Lead Component was added to the plugin and the remaining scope of action of the plugin was not removed. When installed and enabled, this plugin will add Captcha challenges not only for Zoho Lead Component form, but for user registration, password reminder, core contact forms, and others.

The use of Captcha is optional.

1. Open the Joomla administrator interface and log in as a Super Administrator user.



http://www.joomlaxi.com/

http://www.joomlaxi.com/

2. Go to Extensions->Extension Manager. On the Upload Package File frame, click Choose File button. Navigate to the folder where you extracted the plg_zoholead_enmask.zip file and select it. Click Upload & Install button.

3. The following message should appear, indicating a successful installation. If any errors message is returned, verify the directory permissions on the Joomla folders and retry the installation.



4. On Joomla Plugin Manager, open the “System - Enmask Captcha” plugin details. Enable it and make sure support for Zoho Lead is enabled as well. Add captcha feature for other components available as you wish. Save and Close.

5. Verify the Captcha challenge on the Contact page.



Known Issues

Some issues has been identified and solutions are available. Contact [email protected] for more information.

‣ Templates generated with Artisteer® include a component wrapper that prevents Zoho Lead component, and possibly others, to work properly. The solution is a small change on a PHP file of the template;

‣ Templates that does not make use of the frontpage function of Joomla® framework may present a blank page on the return page (the Thank You page). On this cases, a menu item ID must be included on the code when creating the route to the article.



mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Thank You!

theCoder.org - in association with Webify Soluções Computacionais

http://www.webify.com.br

https://www.thecoder.org







Documents

Zoho Lead Component for Joomla 1.7 - User Guide