Soapbox Engage Blog

In our continuing efforts to bring you breaking news from the Joomla - Salesforce.com integration front (humbly known as J!Salesforce), we're pleased to report that our master J!Salesforce developer Kevin has made a few more breakthroughs that should make developers' hearts skip.

Basic use-case proven: member directory

One of the basic use-cases we had to achieve was to display a basic member directory system, that allows visitors to search for members in the Salesforce database based on any of the variables the site's administrators allow searching within. We now are able to have three basic views for this directory:

• search
• search results
• detailed view of a record

Best part about all this: it's pretty quick! Even though we've got the system pinging Salesforce a few times, the roundtrips for data retrieval are very tolerable. I'm sure the bigger your database, the longer it might take, but it's pretty quick in our development test bed.

Create new user in Joomla and contact in Salesforce at registration

Another big hurdle leaped over by Kevin last week was the ability to make a seamless registration system for Joomla and Salesforce. When someone signs up to be a member on your site, or to be added to your organization's rolls as a volunteer or donor, J!Salesforce immediately adds them as a user in Joomla and a contact in Salesforce.

This one step alone will save countless hours for administrators that are fed up with having their Joomla site and CRM user managers out of sync, and hopefully keep hair on the heads of development directors that are sick and tired of missing the connection.

Goals for this week

With all this great work going on, we're gearing up to let the non-profit world know about what's about to be released in early January. We're keeping in touch with our friends at the Salesforce Foundation, and we're hoping to work closely with Salesforce to help spread the word through either their AppExchange or other online collaboration tools.

Meanwhile, on the development side, Kevin will be continuing to clean up the front-end and build some developer guidelines, so when we release it, we'll be able to make life easier (not harder) for our developer friends.