Check it out – http://developer.force.com/sitesgallery

I learned a lot in making my first Force.com Site: a lot of apex, a lot of visualforce and a lot Amazon Web Services.

This Force.com Site consisted of:

• 3 visualforce pages
• 1 apex class
• 1 apex test class
• 2 custom objects and a ton of custom fields
• all images and videos were stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and served through Cloudfront
• most CSS and javascript files were stored on AWS and served through Cloudfront
• uses JW Player (http://www.longtailvideo.com/) to play the video
• uses jquery for the mouse over popup

Learns:

• the rich-text fields are still in “beta” for a reason – they don’t seem to work on visualforce pages yet
• writing test methods for an apex class is a pain! – start by writing the test method first, then write the production method

I’m glad to have this experience under my belt. In fact, I’m proud enough of the Site that the local SFDC User Group is letting me present it (and my experience) to the group at the next meeting.

I had the need for a formula field in Salesforce.com to do two things:

1. Evaluate an expression that my user types in. example: ((2+2) * 6) / 3
2. Store the actual formula the user typed in to another field, in the case the formula should be audited for accuracy.

The formula is different for every record (being used on the Contract standard object), thus the need for my user to type it in. Plus, I have to be able include the actual formula in a Report column for auditors.

I solved this using a few things:

1. Two custom fields:”FieldX__c” for the custom expression and “FieldY__c” for the evaluation
2. Javacript to conduct the calculation
3. A visualforce page to put the two fields and javascript together

Here, in written format, is what the user experiences:

1. The user types their custom expression into “FieldX__c” – ex: (2 + 2) * 6
2. The user clicks on the “=” button
3. The javascript evalutes the expression in “FieldX__C” and stores the value in “FieldY__c”

Here is the apex code used for the visualforce page that includes the javascript:

<apex:page showHeader=”true” sidebar=”false” standardController=”Contract”>

<script type=”text/javascript”>
function calculate(equation)
{
  // equation can have characters 0-9, +, -, *, /, (, ), . and spaces
  // If there are any other characters, return an error
 
  var answer = ‘Equation can ONLY have characters 0-9, +, -, *, /, (, ), . and spaces’;

  if (equation.match(/^[0-9+\-*/(). ]*$/))
  {
    try
    {
      answer = equation != ” ? eval(equation) : ’0′;
    }
    catch (e)
    {
      // Syntax error – Do nothing… answer remains ‘err’
    }
  }
 
  return answer;
}
//
</script>
<apex:form>

<apex:pageBlock id=”custCalcs”>

    <apex:pageBlockButtons >
        <apex:commandButton value=”Save” action=”{!save}”  />
        <apex:commandButton value=”Cancel” action=”{!cancel}”/>              
    </apex:pageBlockButtons>
  
    <apex:pageBlockSection title=”Enter Custom Expressions Here” columns=”1″>
        <apex:pageBlockSectionItem >
            <apex:outputLabel value=”Total Rent” />
            <apex:outputPanel >
                <apex:inputField value=”{!Contract.FieldX__c}” style=”width:400px;” id=”equation”
                    onkeypress=”if ((window.event ? event.keyCode : event.which) == 13) { this.form.elements['{!$Component.answer}'].value = calculate(this.value); }”/>
              
                <input type=”button” value=” = ” onclick=”this.form.elements['{!$component.answer}'].value = calculate(this.form.elements['{!$component.equation}'].value);” />
              
                <apex:inputField value=”{!Contract.FieldY__c}” id=”answer”/>
            </apex:outputPanel>
        </apex:pageBlockSectionItem>          

    </apex:pageBlockSection>      

</apex:pageBlock>

</apex:form>

</apex:page>

The nice thing about it is I sat for the test on Tuesday and on Wednesday at DreamForce they had these boards printed up standing in the heaviest-traveled area of the show floor.

DreamForce '09 - My name amongst those who passed cert exams

My name amongst those who passed cert exams

A couple of months ago we started publishing our audio and video files on iTunes via Podcast and Video Podcast respectively.

If you have iTunes installed, you can find our channel here: Digital Realty Trust Knowledge Library

• Home – I use gmail like an addict
• Home – All of my contacts are synced up with Google Contacts
• Home – My wife and I use Google Docs to help keep track of the family budget
• Home – My wife and I use Google Picasa to store all of our photos online
• Home – My wife and I use Blogger to…blog
• Home – I subscribe to several RSS feeds and use Google Reader multiple times a day
• Home – I recently set up a Google Voice account for call-forwarding and voice mail
• Work – I use the Google Data Visualization API at work to generate graphs
• Work – Of course, I use Google Search hourly
• Work – We will be using Google AdWords to manage our PPC campaign in 2010 
• Work – Several of our videos are hosted on YouTube
• Work – A large section of our corporate website uses Google Maps
• Work – We use Google Analytics to track stats on our website

No wonder they are slowly taking over the world.

Here is the list:

• Website – (www.digitalrealtytrust.com): built on .NET 3.5 on Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008
• “Knowledge Library” – (knowledge.digitalrealtytrust.com): built on the WordPress blogging platform
• Salesforce.com – (www.salesforce.com): the sales force automation, CRM tool we use
• Engage B2B – (www.silverpop.com): the email marketing automation tool we use
• GoToWebinar – (www.gotowebinar.com): our online webinar provider
• Google Analytics – (www.google.com/analtyics): our web stats tracking tool
• Google Picasa – (www.google.com/picasa): our online photo library
• YouTube – (www.youtube.com/digitalrealtytrust): video sharing account
• Twitter – (www.twitter.com/drtdatacenters): so our users know “what [we're] doing”
• LinkedIn – (www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1898885): our social networking group
• Basecamp – (www.basecamphq.com): our online project management software
• OnStream (www.onstreammedia.com): our CDN, video hosting and serving account
• bit.ly – (www.bit.ly): our URL microformat service
• Google FeedBurner – (www.feedburner.com): our RSS feed publishing tool
• iTunes – (www.itunes.com): our podcast and video podcast listing directory
• GoDaddy – (www.godaddy.com): our domain registrar

I was making a list of all my admin passwords for the above list, saw the list continue to grow and thought it was pretty impressive list of tools and systems for which I am the admin.

I guess you can say its a privilege. It’s basically a beta program intended to allow a few customers “production” access to the Force.com Sites technology so that they can fine tune anything before they make it generally available to every Salesforce.com customer. The pilot program, I hear, was rather selective.

Currently, I’m going through the initial set up (nothing to show yet) but I do hope to be able to show some progress, or at least screen shots, here.

More info: http://developer.force.com/sites

Therefore, I took a deep dive into our Google Analytics accounts and sure enough, people shop our website with some rather large resolutions (e.g. 1920×1200, 1680×1050, 1400×1050, 1600×1200).

So, I’ve recently widened the site to 990px:

Screenshot of the new, wider drt.com