First, I need to point out to the world that I am simply the messenger of all this wonderful news we have about the Salesforce.com - Joomla integration. Our lead developer on this, Kevin Devine, has put long nights and sweat into what is shaping to be a fantastic contribution to the open source community.

Now that all your thank you messages are pointed in the right direction, let me give an update as to what Kevin's got cooking. Two days ago we were successfully able to push/pull data to/from Joomla and Salesforce. This means that we can now display data from Salesforce directly in Joomla, and then edit that data via forms in Joomla back into Salesforce. It all happens rather quickly, which is a little surprising since the data has to go back and forth between two servers in completely different parts of the US.

Dynamic display of layout features

Today Kevin just hit another major milestone. Now we're able to bring in form fields from Salesforce following the layout rules prescribed within Salesforce. For instance, say in your Salesforce layout you have a dropdown list for a contact's suffix. Now without any hassle you can have Joomla directly display that dropdown populated properly from Salesforce.

Pretty darn cool.

Someone had to step up and do it, so PICnet is doing it. We're bringing a fully connected Salesforce.com component to the Joomla community, and should have a beta version ready for download by the middle of January 2007.

The goal here is to build a strong framework that future developers (including ourselves in our Non-Profit Soapbox system) can continue to extend. For instance, our J!Salesforce component will allow Joomla site visitors to input their contact information in Salesforce through Joomla, using a simple form. Then, when a visitor returns to the Web site, they can login using the Joomla login form, be authenticated against Salesforce.com, and then be able to edit their contact information in Salesforce securely.

Pretty darn powerful.

We're proud to be the first ones developing this connection for the Joomla community, and look forward to working with the Salesforce Foundation to help spread the good word to our non-profit users. Don't worry business users, we've got something in store for you too.

We should be rolling out a roadmap to the development of this component, as well as add-ons for J!Salesforce at the end of December 2006. What would be nice is to hear from the community as to what users and developers would like to have this integration piece do for them, so we can make sure we're meeting the needs of the community.