Formie supports over 50 different types of integrations, from Mailchimp, Zoho, Salesforce and more. But did you know you can use these APIs in your project without having to create your own connection to their APIs?

Using Guzzle clients#

Each integration creates a Guzzle (opens new window) client to perform all the API requests to fetch, create or update content. This is usually to push content from your Formie form submissions into these providers as newsletter subscribers, CRM leads, rows in a Google Sheet, and lots more. Which is all well and good for form submissions, but what if you wanted to do more?

Let's say you want to add a checkbox to your users' profile page, whether they want to subscribe to a mailing list you provide. Sure, you could make that a Formie form, but that's probably overkill. You could implement your own logic to add or remove the user from the chosen list, all while letting Formie handle the API side of things.

Usage in PHP#

Let's look at an example using an integration in PHP via a module. First, you'll need to get familiar with creating a module. The code we will be writing will be in PHP, and added to our custom module.

Place the below in your module's init() method.

use craft\services\Plugins;
use verbb\formie\Formie;
use yii\base\Event;

public function init(): void
{
    // ...

    // Ensure we only run this when Craft is ready, and plugins are loaded
    Event::on(Plugins::class, Plugins::EVENT_AFTER_LOAD_PLUGINS, function(Event $event) {
        // Fetch the Formie integration with the handle `mailchimp`
        $integration = Formie::$plugin->getIntegrations()->getIntegrationByHandle('mailchimp');

        // Fetch all the lists from Mailchimp (which uses the `getClient()` defined in the integration class)
        $json = $integration->request('GET', 'lists');
    });

    // ...
}

This code illustrates us fetching an integration by its handle, and calling getClient() to retrieve the Guzzle client. We can then do anything that the Mailchimp API allows (in this case, we're fetching all the lists on the account.

It's really important to only run our code inside the Plugins::EVENT_AFTER_LOAD_PLUGINS event, otherwise, we risk this code running before the Formie plugin (or Craft itself) has loaded.

We also use $integration->request() from Formie as a bit of a helper function to just handle JSON APIs, but it's totally equivalent to:

use craft\helpers\Json;

$client = $integration->getClient();
$response = $client->request('GET', 'lists');
$json = Json::decode((string)$response->getBody());

Which can be useful if you want access to the Guzzle client itself, if the API doesn't support JSON payloads, or if you want full control over the request and response.

Usage in Twig#

You can do a similar thing in Twig, even a little briefer.

{% set integration = craft.formie.getPlugin().getIntegrations.getIntegrationByHandle('mailchimp') %}
{% set lists = integration.request('GET', 'lists') %}

{% for list in lists.lists %}
    {{ list.id }}: {{ list.name }}<br>
{% endfor %}

You can of course do way more than GET requests. We could even subscribe a user to a list right from Twig.

{% set integration = craft.formie.getPlugin().getIntegrations.getIntegrationByHandle('mailchimp') %}

{# For the list id `1234` subscribe the email `[email protected]`  #}
{% set response = integration.request('POST', 'lists/1234/members', {
    email_address: '[email protected]',
}) %}

{# Do something with the response... #}
{% dd response %}

Closing thoughts#

While creating Guzzle clients through Craft is very straightforward without Formie (Craft requires Guzzle), things can get complicated quick if an API provider requires OAuth, or other special handling (see Creating OAuth integrations with Formie).

So using this approach takes away the burden of setting all that up, and you can worry about doing amazing things with APIs instead!

​Using Guzzle clients#

​Usage in PHP#

​Usage in Twig#

​Closing thoughts#

Using Guzzle clients#

Usage in PHP#

Usage in Twig#

Closing thoughts#