As a follow-up to my "what's new with Salesforce PFG Adapter (i.e. Plone/Salesforce.com integration as made possible by PloneFormGen)" entry and screencast, I also needed to make some video on a newer project called RSVP For Salesforce for Jon's use at the latest Plone Symposium. I think the aforementioned project page on Plone.org provides a decent overview of its current features and limitations, but of course a screencast is always more indicative of how it's used. 

Hope you enjoy:

NB: While not quite as mature as our PloneFormGen integration code, RSVP for Salesforce has happily pulled in a bunch of online registrations for an upcoming workshop ONE/Northwest is hosting called Strategy and Best Practices for Action Alerts and Other Email Communications.  I'm hoping to improve the ease of configuration before we use this more widely.

On a final note, this is an interesting problem space because, as mentioned in the video, the promotion of an event, capture of participants, and ongoing interaction with attendees required by event registration really weaves back and forth between tools for managing content and for managing constituents.  An aim to solve this with one tool seems a recipe for an inflexible monolith, which will lead to an inevitable compromise in features and functionality.  Having such capable systems as Plone serving as the CMS and Salesforce.com the CRM seems like such a natural separation of concerns where the sum is so much greater than the parts.  Marrying the tools together took a fraction of the time and effort required to build even a subset of the functionality from the ground up.  That is something I find endlessly exciting.

PloneFormGen is due for some refactoring to take advantage of Zope 3 and Plone 3 technologies. But meanwhile, I've taken the opportunity to integrate a couple of handy new contributions.

Ratings-Scale Field

Titus Anderson of the University of Louisville has contributed code for a Likert Scale Field. I've renamed it to be "Ratings-Scale Field" to use a  more common name and reflect its more general usability. This field supplies a table of question rows, each with radio-button answers.

Saved-Data Editor

Andreas Jung contributed an editor for saved data. Switch to the tabular view of your saved data, and you'll have a new option to individual items.

Egg Cooked

This was actually added in 1.2.3. PFG is now available as a PyPI egg. Just add Products.PloneFormGen to the eggs section of your buildout . Jens Klein's great ScriptableFields have also been cooked into eggs and declared as requirements for the PFG egg; so dependencies are automatically handled!

Sprint Planning

I'm hoping to make PFG refactoring a sprint topic at the 2008 Plone Conference. If you're interested, visit the planning page for details and sign up. Andrew Burkhalter and I have been scheming for a possible earlier sprint that might lay the technical foundations. Let one of us know if you're excited by that idea.

-- Steve McMahon

It's been a while since I've written an update on the progress that's occurred leveraging the fantastic PloneFormGen to save form responses directly within Salesforce.com and the aforementioned article (though still a good source of background information now has several factual inaccuracies.

The 1.5 branch of the code base has seen a couple of initial releases and offers the following features, which I've enjoyed using on some of the sites we've deployed:

• "Parent"/"Chained" adapters - There's now a simple UI and functionality for related record creation within Salesforce.com.
  
• Support for file uploads (typically stored as an Attachment record related to some other record within the CRM system)
  
• Better handling of dates
  
• A whole host of other minor bug fixes
  

Of course, it's always better to see, rather than read what I'm talking about.  The following screencast consists of a pretty advanced example that demonstrates all of the aforementioned features and then some:

Thanks to Jon Stahl, who presented on the above at the latest NOLA Plone Symposium.  Without his refusal to demo this live, creating these videos would likely still be on my todo list.  Hope you enjoy!

With the release of Plone 3.2, all the major Plone installers will be buildout-based.

The Unified Installer is already buildout-based, and there are experimental buildout-based binary installers for Windows and OS X available on launchpad.net. The Windows and OS X installers will not require installation of a compiler.

This represents a watershed event for the deployment of Plone: buildout will be our mainstream product installation system. What was once a technology for developers will have become a technology for integrators.

If we're to make Plone's installation story as good as possible for integrators, this is going to require some adjustments by add-on product developers.

• It's time to eggify your products and upload them to PyPI. It's amazingly easy to do so, and there are several examples in the collective that you may use as models. Look in particular for the Products.* products like Products.Clouseau, Products.PloneSoftwareCenter, Products.PloneHelpCenter and Products.PloneSoftwareCenter. Most of these are simple updates of existing products. You may still (and for some time, should) create old-style tarball distributions from the same codebase without much extra work.
• Strongly consider putting your eggified product in the Products.* namespace to simplify installation. That's currently the easiest way to avoid the need for ZCML slugs, which are incomprehensible to many integrators. If you're converting an existing product, it really belongs in the Products.* namespace so that code that imports it doesn't break.
  
• Once that's done, update your installation instructions to document installation with buildout. It's a lot simpler than the old method.
• Don't tell folks to use your buildout. That's a fine idea while a product is in development and the development team needs to have the same environment. But, it's the wrong thing to tell an integrator. Tell them how to add your product to their buildout with as few side-effects as possible.
  

6/4/08 - New Orleans

    The symposium was kicked off at 9:30AM CST this morning.  There are two tracks: developers and business.  The conference attendees are of an interesting blend: the business track has about 30% of the attendee's. The development track ranges from sophisticated production environments to point-and-click salesforce integration.  The symposium will last 2 days. Each evening all the attendees will meet up to have food and drinks at a
local bar. And of course there will be music after 10PM at the venue. Enfold Systems hosted the conference with sponsorships from Diamond Data Systems, Six Feetup and Gocept Consulting.
    So far the big news has been that the Plone Handbook for End Users has been released for Plone 3.x. Free under the creative commons and will shortly be available in hard copy at Amazon.com in the United States.  You can find the book at http://plonebook.info/ -- check it out!  A few other tidbits.
    Enfold Systems has announced the releases of their product line. The Microsoft Web Server integration, Enfold Proxy 4.0 (commercial product) with support for Vista with numerous bug fixes and a complete documentation overhaul.  Enfold Desktop 4.0, now *FREE* is available in its final form. And the release candidate for Enfold Server 4.0 which ships with Plone 3.1.2 and a complete overhaul of documentation. 
    The new enfold systems website has been launched!  It uses Enfold Systems content deployment platform, Entransit.  *VERY* interesting.  And demonstrates Enfold System's committment to the content deployment platform.  Check out the website and let us know what you think! http://www.enfoldsystems.com/
    Desktop 4.0 final offers a superior user experience to past versions and Enfold Systems has committed to merging all DAV/Server component patches to the Zope and Plone platforms.