Integrating a WordPress contact form with the Highrise CRM

Whilst quoting for a project recently I had to look into integrating a WordPress site with Highrise, the Customer Relationship Management software from Basecamp, née 37signals. I'm not sure whether it is because the product is no longer accepting new sign ups (and hasn't been for many years), but there was no off-the-shelf WordPress plug-in shown on their 'Extras' page. So I had to do some digging. Here are some useful links that I found.

Use the custom "dropbox" email

Highrise has always had a "dropbox" email address for each customer. This means that any email can be forwarded into the system and it will try and do a good job of either creating a new customer record of the original sender, or attaching the email to an existing customer record.

This is perhaps why there is no WordPress plug-in. The official Highrise blog post seems to suggest setting up a random email account to deal with receiving and forwarding the email from a contact form to this secret dropbox email address. Sources: Highrise blog and Support document

Use a custom WordPress plug-in

Highrise does have an API available for you to build your own integrations. The Highrise API documentation can be found on Github, but I also found this helpful article about creating a WordPress plug-in. I'm not sure whether this is still compatible with the current version of WordPress, but if we go down this route (if the project gets commissioned) then I will update this article.

Use another form provider

We have a Wufoo account at work, so we could also just use that. Apparently there is still an active/supported integration available. Again, if we end up using this, I will update this article.