Magento 1 - How can I use customer data in a Magento CMS page?

Question

We have a link in our footer that goes to a page with an embedded Formstack form. I understand how to pre-populate the form by editing the URL, but I'm unsure how to get the respective fields from Magento.

If the user is logged in to Magento, I would like to use their First Name, Last Name, and email address to pre-populate the respective fields in the formstack form.

In the end I need something like this

?firstname=John&lastname=Doe&[email protected]

with the actual customer data. How can I retrieve this data within a CMS page?

Answer 1

While there are some dynamic variables that you can use in the CMS, it's not possible to get user information without custom code.

If you embed your form in a phtml template instead of a CMS page, you can include this template in the CMS:

{{block type="core/template" template="your/form.phtml"}}

In the template, you can use any PHP code like

$customer = Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')->getCustomer();
$firstname = $customer->getFirstname();

It would be best practice to move this code to a block class. Note that you can specify the block type as well, so instead of core/template you can use any other block.

But either way, you have to add the block type to the block whitelist in "System> Permissions> Blocks" to be able to use it in the CMS (see: https://magento.stackexchange.com/a/87897/243)