Using cURL to POST form to two places

Question

Yesterday I asked a question about how I could go about hijacking my MailChimp contact form to send an additional email (when certain conditions are met).

I wrote changed the action="... from the MailChimp URL to my own process_email.php with code resembling the following:

extract($_POST);
$url = 'http://myMailchimpUser.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe/post';
$fields = array(
    'u' => urlencode($u),
    'id' => urlencode($id),
    'group' => http_build_query ($group),
    'MERGE1' => urlencode($MERGE1),
    'MERGE2' => urlencode($MERGE2),
    'MERGE3' => http_build_query($MERGE3),
    'other_more_info_text' => urlencode($other_more_info_text),
    'submit' => urlencode($submit)
);

foreach($fields as $key=>$value) { $fields_string .= $key.'='.$value.'&'; }
rtrim($fields_string, '&');

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST, count($fields));
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields_string);

$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

I have yet to add the code which sends the email to myself, but that should be trivial. The problem I'm having with this code is that instead of redirecting me to the MailChimp page, its actually loading within process_email.php (and its loading incorrectly to boot.)

I know I can accomplish what I want to do if I used JavaScript, but it seems to me that isn't the proper way to go about this. Can anyone offer me any help?

Answer 1

If I understand correctly: you want to POST data locally first then let the form POST to Mailchimp. If that is what you are trying to do, then using some JS connected to the form (or a form button) is probably the best way to go. I think it is the proper way to go in your situation.

Something jQuery like below would work to POST the form locally first, and once that request is complete it would submit the form using the given action url (mailchimp).

$(document).ready(function(){
    $('#submit-button').click(function(event){
        event.preventDefault();
        $.post("your_email_parser.php", $('#form-id').serialize(), function(){
            $('#form-id').submit();
        });
    });
});

...

<form id='form-id' action='http://myMailchimpUser.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe/post' method='post'>
    ...
    <input type='submit' id='submit-button' />
</form>