Sameer Borate as a new post to his blog today looking at some of the quirks he's found when dealing with the $_POST superglobal in PHP.

A little quirk of PHP $_POST var I encountered while fixing a Salesforce web-to-Lead bug. A Wordpress site was using a form to submit user requests to the Salesforce web-service. The form that submitted the data had the following fields along with the others. The problem was with the multi-select field, only the last value selected in the multi-select was getting captured.

He investigated and found that his code was echoing out all of the values, but wasn't using the "field_name[]" notation with the square brackets to send back multiple values to PHP. Changing this and trying again, he noticed it still wasn't working as expected (with Salesforce). He figured out they're using "raw" versus "cooked" handling of the POSTed variables. Check out the rest of his post to find out what that means.

In a new post to his blog Court Ewing takes a look at integrating your PHP application with one of the most popular and powerful CRM solutions out there, Salesforce.

If your primary clientele is small to medium business owners, as I imagine is the case for most professional developers these days, chances are you have developed custom applications that interact with Salesforce CRM. For those of you that have not had the delight of integrating with Salesforce, let's walk through the most common integration techniques.

He starts with the Force.com web services and shows how to generate your WSDL, get your security token for requests and gives some example code that uses both to test the login. He follows this with examples of the five methods that are a "must know" for anyone using the API - upsert, retrieve, getUpdated, delete, getDeleted. He throws in a few "gotchas" at the end - one dealing with retrieve calls and their results and the other relates to how the PHP toolkit handles errors.

lanstein has submitted a two-part article series looking at connecting your PHP application with the Salesforce.com APIs (as a part of a blog dedicated entirely to the subject):

PHP and Salesforce is a new blog dedicated to helping web developers take control over their CRM integration. Most of the early entries will focus on building a reference of Salesforce PHP examples, followed by discussions on topics including performance, concurrency, CRM framework architecture (and whether you should consider building one), and strategies for handling scheduled and unscheduled outages.

The first article gives an overview of how to make the connection, where to get the tools you'll need and provides a bit of sample code to let you test out a connection. The second article looks at lead generation in the Salesforce application.

If you're interested in the Salesforce+PHP combination, you should definitely check out this blog.