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