Soapbox Engage Blog

Sometimes your schedule changes, and you've got to rearrange a meeting. Then sometimes you get invited to have lunch and go to Joomla presentations by core team members to a Google developer audience and your day completely changes.

Tomorrow I'll be attending a few sessions at the Googleplex, led by Joomla team members including Louis Landry, Wilco Jansen, Hannes Papenberg and Laurens Vandeput. Their Google guide for the trip, Leslie Hawthorn, is a wonderful mix of open source developer mom and supporter of everything that leads to happy developers. She's even talked about the great open source speakers series that they're having a Google these days, including our Joomla devs.

Throughout tomorrow I'll do my best to post updates to the blog, including some video and photos of the talks. I'll also make sure to provide fully detailed reports on the Google cafeteria food, which I promise to eat until fully stuffed.

(Photos and video after the page flip...)

In our efforts to go beyond just the nuts and bolts of bridging the gap between CRM and CMS applications, PICnet has kicked off our community building effort for Joomla and Salesforce.com users. We're a bunch of regular matchmakers.

Yesterday I had great meeting with Meghan Nesbit of the Salesforce.com Foundation at their offices in downtown SF. We chatted about a variety of items, including the impact that Salesforce is having in the non-profit community, with well more than 1,000 licenses of their non-profit version of Salesforce distributed for free to organizations across the US. Even better, these non-profit users get the same standard support paying Salesforce corporate users receive.

I also learned about a vibrant non-profit Salesforce user community that bubbles up in three different places:

• Non-Profit Salesforce.com Practioners Google group
• Non-Profit forums at Salesforce.com
• Twice a month conference call with non-profit practitioners

When I had a chance to demo what we've already put together for J!Salesforce, Meghan seemed pretty happy with the results, and seemed especially in tune with some of the trickiness to the integration on items such as multi-select boxes. Her comments were a nice pat on the back of Kevin's tireless work over the past few weeks, and sparked a fire under our feet to keep the ball rolling.

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.

Joomla Tuesdays are coming back. And for those who continue to doubt that someone with an art history degree can run a web site? We want you there.

When we built Soapbox, PICnet's low-cost, easy-to-set-up content management system exclusively for Non-Profits, we used the Joomla! content management system as its foundation. There were lots of reasons for that. But the main was that Joomla's -- and, by extension, Soapbox's -- universally acclaimed ease-of-use makes it a great fit for many nonprofits, who often make do without a large technical staff.