Drupal with Salesforce and "gated" Custom Content Types

Hello,

Is there a better approach to integrating Drupal, Custom Content Types and Salesforce?

Current Drupal setup:

There's a number of "Assets" (different content types: videos, white papers, podcasts) and each node is "gated" which means visitors are required fill out a form before accessing the content. Once a visitors fills out a single form for any asset a cookie is set and access is granted to all assets.

To accomplish this functionality we are checking if a cookie is set from within the node-type.tpl.php template files. If a cookie is set, we show a link to the node / the content, if not, we show a link to a open a web form (generated by a function in template.php). Once the form gets submitted, values are passed to Salesforce via curl, a cookie gets set and the visitor gets a success message with a link to the node which shows the content.

This works for the most part but there's a few issues. We are ending up with duplicate leads in Salesorce due to people coming back after the cookie expires and filling out the forms again. We also have some people who are "Team members" (no drupal accounts) and should just be able to access content without filling out a form.

Moving forward / goal:

To make things easier for content publishers we are going to be adding a checkbox field to our asset content types to control weather or not a node should be gated. We are going to add a drop down selection to choose from one of three different lead forms (short, medium, long or something along those lines) and adding a Campaign ID and lead source field to each asset as well for controlling which assets go to which campaign.

And - to cut down on duplicate leads / form submissions we to have a link at the top of each form for "Are you a Team Member?" that somehow would allow access or set a cookie, not sure of the best way to accomplish this yet (Any suggestions? Would this be where we make an API call to SF to check if this person's name exists in leads...?).

I'm planning to accomplish all this just using CCK (creating the fields), node templates (showing the fields, controlling which form is shown etc) and some custom functions in template.php that generate forms and handle salesforce submission via curl.

So

Hopefully this all makes sense. I'm wondering if there's a more "Drupal" way to go about integrating Salesforce with Drupal.

I've seen the Salesforce Suite, it looks promising but may not exactly fit with our goals.

Thanks for any suggestions / direction!