collective.salesforce.rsvp 1.0

RSVP for Salesforce

Product home is http://plone.org/products/collective.salesforce.rsvp A documentation area and issue tracker are available at the linked locations.

A Google Group, called Plone Salesforce Integration exists with the sole aim of discussing and developing tools to make Plone integrate well with Salesforce.com. If you have a question, joining this group and posting to the mailing list is the likely best way to get support.

Failing that, please try using the Plone users’ mailing list or the #plone irc channel for support requests. If you are unable to get your questions answered there, or are interested in helping develop the product, see the credits below for individuals you might contact.

Overview

Using Plone’s Archetypes system and archetypes.schemaextender, the RSVP for Salesforce add-on product enables a mechanism for “marking” pieces of content as eligible to accept RSVPs (i.e. registrations) from site visitors. The act of “marking” content extends the existing piece of content with several additional fields for custom RSVP behaviors.

However, this is not a generic RSVP/registration system, but as the name suggests, is optimized to work with the Salesforce.com Customer Relationship Management system, which is a generic system that can be used to manage Leads, Contacts, Campaigns, and Events. By default, registrants are stored as Lead objects with an associated CampaignMember object serving as the “junction” between an organization’s configured “Campaign” and those interested in participating. This can be useful in cases of in person and/or virtual events (i.e. a training, a conference, a political rally, etc.) and online campaigns allowing participant sign-on (signature drives, pledge drives, etc.). The default behavior of creating a Lead and CampaignMember associated with the configured Campaign can be fully customized with the optional add-on Plone products PloneFormGen (and dependencies) and Salesforce PFG Adapter.

Features of RSVP for Salesforce include:

• Complete integration with the robust and powerful CRM system Salesforce.com

• Ability to mark and configure any Archetypes content object as RSVP-aware

• Default registration form requiring minimal attendee information and completely free of complex configuration demands.

• Optional maximum capacity for RSVP-enabled activities

• Optional acceptance of “waitlist” registrations in the event of cancellations

• Optional expiration date for the automatic disabling of RSVP

• Ability to model “first come first served” or “apply for acceptance after further consideration” type events. This can be done by setting the default signup “status” from within Salesforce.com for the RSVP-enabled event (i.e. the status for a newly created CampaignMember could be “sent”, “applied”, “responded”, etc. depending upon how event attendance is modeled in each case.

• Optional Add-on Capability: Using PloneFormGen with Salesforce PFG Adapter create enhanced and completely customizable registration forms requesting and/or requiring arbitrary sign-up data that can be mapped to arbitrary Salesforce.com objects. The referring “RSVP” accepting Salesforce.com object id is passed to the custom form for appropriate association.

What this isn’t…

… and may or may not ever be:

• A general, feature complete ticketing, online registration system. This is simple and optimized to integrate well with Salesforce.com and is optimized towards events with a flexible amount of capacity. While one can certainly use this to lock down capacity a bit more tightly, the burden is upon a correct configuration of the capacity related fields.

• A system for accepting online payment to secure event attendance – though we’re placing bets internally on how long it will be until this feature is requested.

• A fail safe system for absolutely capping attendance at a hard capacity. Because a greater than max capacity # of participants could load a custom PloneFormGen-based registration form (or the default registration form for that matter) that suggests available capacity, we advise you to set expectations appropriately during the signup process and via any auto-response emails that are sent. In other words, text like the following goes a long way towards expectation management: “Thanks for expressing your interest in attending our event. A follow-up email will be sent within 24 hours confirming your space for the event.”

DEPENDENCIES

RSVP for Salesforce requires Plone 3.0 or greater.

The following dependencies should be pulled in automatically when you install the egg:

• beatbox >= 0.9.1.1

• Products.salesforcebaseconnector >= 1.0

• archetypes.schemaextender

If you want to use custom PloneFormGen-based registration forms, then you must have PloneFormGen >= 1.5b2.

CONFIGURATION TIPS

Q: But I only want content type X or Y (i.e. Event objects) to be configured as RSVP-aware…

A: To limit which content types the user can easily configure as RSVP-aware, the condition_expr for the “allowRSVPs” and “disableRSVPs” actions, could be changed to something like (replace ‘Event’ with the name(s) of your preferred content type below):

condition_expr="python:not object.restrictedTraverse('@@rsvp-configuration').isRSVPEnabled() and object.portal_type in ('Event',) "

Q: How can I customize the registration form and messages?

A: You can configure a PloneFormGen form as a custom registration form. In this case RSVP for Salesforce displays the form and checks for whether capacity has been reached, but does not actually handle the management of records in Salesforce.com. To achieve that with a custom registration form, use the Salesforce PFG Adapter (Products.salesforcepfgadapter). In a typical use case, you might use two PFG adapters to create a Contact and a CampaignMember object linking that contact to a particular campaign.

Note: This requires PloneFormGen >= 1.5b2.

RSVP for Salesforce will pass the configured Salesforce object (typically a Campaign) to the form in the ‘signup-object-id’ variable of the request, so that it is possible to optionally use the same registration form to register people for multiple campaigns. For instance, you might create a ‘CampaignID’ string field in the PloneFormGen form with the server-side only flag set (so that the field doesn’t render) and with a default value override like python:request.get(‘signup-object-id’, ‘’), and map this field to the Salesforce CampaignID field via the salesforcepfgadapter edit screen.

If you need to modify the messages regarding waitlist status and successful registration, the best approach is to override the rsvp.register viewlet on a theme-specific browser layer. The ZMCL to do so might look something like this:

<browser:viewlet
    name="rsvp.register"
    for="collective.salesforce.rsvp.interfaces.ISalesforceRSVPable"
    manager="plone.app.layout.viewlets.interfaces.IBelowContentBody"
    class="collective.salesforce.rsvp.registration.RegistrationViewlet"
    template="path/to/my_custom_template.pt"
    allowed_interface="collective.salesforce.rsvp.interfaces.IRegistrationViewlet"
    permission="zope2.View"
    layer="myproduct.interfaces.IThemeSpecific"
    />

where my_custom_template.pt would be a modified copy of browser/templates/registration-viewlet.pt from this package.

Credits

The Plone & Salesforce crew in Seattle and Portland:

• Jon Baldivieso <jonb –AT– onenw –DOT– org>

• Andrew Burkhalter <andrewburkhalter –AT– gmail –DOT– com>

• Brian Gershon <briang –AT– webcollective –DOT– coop>

• David Glick <davidglick –AT– onenw –DOT– org>

• Jesse Snyder <jesses –AT– npowerseattle –DOT– org>

Salesforce.com Foundation and Enfold Systems for their gift and work on beatbox and the original proof of concept code that has become Salesforce Auth Plugin (see: http://gokubi.com/archives/onenorthwest-gets-grant-from-salesforcecom-to-integrate-with-plone)

CHANGELOG

collective.salesforce.rsvp - 1.0 (2009-01-13)

• Updated salesforcebaseconnector dependency to v1.0 final. [davisagli]

• Show both the id and label for Salesforce objects and fields. [davisagli]

• Refactored to wrap the form rendering in the capacity check regardless of which type of form is being used. [davisagli]

• Take advantage of new embedded forms support in PloneFormGen when rendering a custom registration form. This requires PloneFormGen >= 1.5b2. [davisagli]

• Refactored the registration form viewlet and default registration form to be rendered in a much saner fashion. [davisagli]

• Add i18n message ids. [davisagli]

• Make the “limit registration capacity” field actually have an effect rather than just controlling display of other form fields. This helps in the edge case where the user clicks this to turn capacity off, but the hidden fields are still selected. [davisagli]

• Make the “enable custom registration form” actually have an effect rather than just controlling display of another form field. This helps workaround the issue with not being able to un-reference an item with the ATReferenceBrowserWidget. [davisagli]

collective.salesforce.rsvp - 1.0a4

• Fix for kss configuration issue within Plone 3.0.x. See: http://plone.org/products/collective.salesforce.rsvp/issues/1 [andrewb]

• provide zcml declarations for all registration-based browser:page templates, this allows for standard customization via layers for others using this product, traverse to browser pages, so that layers are accounted for [andrewb]

collective.salesforce.rsvp - 1.0a3

• Fixing kss configuration tests and uninstallation tests, so that we can better claim support for Plone 3.1.x along with 3.0.x [andrewb]

• Package branding changed to ‘RSVP for Salesforce’ [andrewb, thanks jonstahl]

collective.salesforce.rsvp - 1.0a2

• Cleanup of some problematic RST formatting pulled into the long desc on PyPI [andrewb]

collective.salesforce.rsvp - 1.0a1

• Initial experimental release of RSVP for Salesforce feature allowing for Plone content objects to be tied to “registerable” Salesforce.com objects [andrewb]

RUNNING TESTS

It is strongly recommended that you run your tests against a free developer account, rather than a real production Salesforce.com instance. … With that said, to run the tests for Salesforce Auth Plugin do the following:

Field Label         Field Name          Field Type    Field Description

-----------         ----------          ----------    -----------------

Allow Waitlists?    Allow_Waitlists     Checkbox      Will you accept waitlist
                                                      registrations for this campaign?
                                                      Only required if you plan to enable
                                                      RSVPs in a capacity limited way
                                                      via your website.

Max Capacity        Max_Capacity         Number(18, 0)

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