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TYPO3 and Salesforce
Displaying Salesforce content in TYPO3
We've been getting a lot of requests lately for Salesforce integration for both TYPO3 and Magento. Our latest work, spearheaded by team member Lars, is a Salesforce extension for TYPO3. Here's what we discovered along the way:
There are some great tools out there to help push and pull data from Salesforce, e.g. the Apex Data Loader and more advanced ETL tools like jitterbit and Informatica. But in a production environment, every tool brings a little overhead, so being able to talk directly to an API provides an opportunity to simplify things. Also, Salesforce has a rich API, so it made sense for us to invest some development time to produce tools to make routine Salesforce integration tasks easy. We developed and released the ID_salesforce extension for TYPO3, which, in its current state is a simple data synchronization extension that has a interactive mapper and scheduler. Long story short, it lets you import large SFDC datasets into TYPO3 and efficiently keep the dataset synchronized. We are pleased with the results and looking forward to extending it in the future.
Lars will do a follow-up post on with some technical details but for now you can read more on the forge page, or download it for the TYPO3 TER and take it for a spin.
And if you're in the area, come by the office for our upcoming Meetup to learn about the extension in person!
TYPO3 Templating 3.0
San Francisco TYPO3 Users Group
The next meeting of the Bay Area TYPO3 Users Group will take place on February 21st from 6:30PM to 8:30PM at the Infield Design Offices. Join us for presentations and informal question and answer session. People new to TYPO3 are encouraged to join us, and we'll give an introduction to TYPO3 to help get you going.
This month we'll take a look at some new templating tools:
- Grid Elements - The Grid Elements extension is an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for the TYPO3 backend. We will cover how to install and use grid elements. A new extension for flexible content elements and drag-and-drop in the classic site module. [http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-gri...]
- FLUID templates - Fluid will be the standard templating engine used in the TYPO3 v5 project. It is also available in TYPO3 v4 since version 4.3. There will be a quick overview of FLUID. How to use it for page layouts and in extensions. [http://forge.typo3.org/projects/package-typ...]
- FED (Fluid Extbase Development Framework) - We'll give a quick tour of FED, a collection of features integrating Extbase and Fluid even further with TYPO3. Here's a library of helpful functions for FLUID and ExtBase. [http://fedext.net]
We hope you can join us for some TYPO3 fun and a beer . . . . and spread the word!
Cross domain proof of concept with TYPO3 eID and jQuery
I just wanted to post a quick blog to share a small snippet of code that I'm working on to solve an issue with cross-site scripting restrictions, a solution to a very practical and real-world problem.
The (example) issue: A carpet company has a wide network of suppliers, each of which give the carpet company a basic (HTML/CSS/JS) page to put some content about the carpets, prices, contact information, company policy, etc. All of this information is available in the carpet company's TYPO3-powered website, and it's updated and improved regularly by the carpet company staff. Ideally the carpet company would like to have the updated information displayed on all supplier websites automatically. How can this be done? With TYPO3 and a bit of jQuery, we can quite easily achieve a workable solution!
Given in our hypothetical situation we are limited to HTML, CSS, and Javascript, one solution that comes to mind is using Javascript to pull in the desired content from the main carpet TYPO3 site. This can be accomplished using JSONP. For those unfamiliar, most browsers enforce a same-origin policy, which prevents us from making a simple AJAX call to get our desired data, so a site such as http://www.acmefloorsuppliers.com couldn't make a "normal" AJAX call to www.acmecarpets.com; it would be blocked by the browser. So instead, we essentially dynamically load a remote Javascript file/object/JSON, and then evaluate its contents. The magic here is that we pass a parameter to the remote server, which is a function name that the JSON return value is to be wrapped in. So, for instance, the GET string might be something like:
(acme carpet domain).com?eid=id_ajax&value=somevalue&callback=callback123
Our server side code on acmecarpets.com will return what is essentially a function call, like this:
callback123({"results":{"somevalue":"some return value here"}});
In the example below, I'm using jQuery (which I really love by the way!), which automatically takes care of the heavy lifting for us. It will automatically define the callback123 function (in reality this function name is automatically and dynamically generated by jQuery in the example below) and we are left with JSON to work with in our callback function.
Here is a working example in which individual content elements are pulled from tt_content based on their uid (which is what we're passing in with the GET parameter). Note that this is more of a proof of concept, and not a production-ready snippet. The server side code I wrote does a very minimal amount of security validation - without proper care, this type of script can be dangerous, so ultimately it's up to the developer to insure safety. The server side code only checks to see that the fe_user is not set for each content element. This example is also not particularly scalable, however it could be much more so if the server side code were fleshed out further. Also, this will NEVER be a great solution for any sort of crucial data. In my example, I have default content loaded in the event that the script fails to load external data; and in our carpet store example we might have a set of default information that is displayed, so in the event of a javascript (or external server) failure our distributors still have the critical information.
Enter list of content element IDs to load dynamically (ie 206,201,169)
Example content from different origin/domain (it might look familiar!)
If there is any interest in implementation details, or how exactly I wrote my server side code, I will write another blog post going into a bit more detail! Additionally, if anybody has any general ideas about how to go about this task without reinventing the wheel (perhaps this sort of functionality is already built into TYPO3 somewhere?), I'd love to hear it. Down the road I intend to make a version of my server side code which pulls out tt_news or tt_calendar items, but I'm unfamiliar with the inner workings of each of these extensions and am new to development within the TYPO3 ecosystem so would appreciate any pointers!
TYPO3 San Francisco Conference by the numbers
It's been a week since we said goodbye to all our visiting TYPO3 friends, but I for one am still energized from the camaraderie, enthusiasm, and sheer brain trust of the growing TYPO3 community. It felt a little like summer camp, i.e., bonding instantly with strangers, spending a solid 36 hours together, then exchanging contact information, and counting down the days until next year's conference in Quebec.
ID played host to the conference this year, and it was a real success on a lot of levels. A few of my highlights:
- Jochen Weiland's (jweiland.net) "Pushing your site to the Top 10: SEO with TYPO3" Jesper Scheuer Nielsen's (MOC Systems) "Scrum from the TYPO3 Trenches."
- The picturesque Fort Mason Center, set against the Golden Gate bridge and some unusually sunny SF weather
- The generosity of all the volunteers who helped keep the conference running smoothly (I can't thank you enough!)
- Karaoke at the Cathay House
- Unlimited tacos at ID’s after-party
- After months of preparation, emails, and phone calls, finally meeting so many extraordinary individuals from the TYPO3 community
Here are some stats on the conference:
Number of talks and sessions: 36
Number of countries represented: 12
(Austria, Columbia, Canada, Denmark, India, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States)
Number of states represented: 15
(California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin)
Liters of coffee consumed: 91
Liters of beer consumed at the ID office during the conference week: 82
A Look Back at the TYPO3 San Francisco Conference
This year’s TYPO3 conference here in San Francisco was great for many reasons, but far and away the greatest thing about the conference was the wonderful group of people that I met. There are too many names to name, but suffice it to say that my sense of the breadth of the TYPO3 community has grown exponentially! Not only were the people great, but the event itself was a huge success (go team!). It’s pretty awesome to see the city of San Francisco from the eyes of so many new to the city.
At the center of all of the fun of course was TYPO3, and I learned a TON. Highlights for me included sessions about SOLR search integration, the future of TYPO3 Phoenix including the Aloha editor, and customer content elements with Extbase. Lots of great content, and lots of great tools to help make a better and more full experience for our clients.
It was great to see just how large the TYPO3 community really is, and the number of intelligent, committed developers and integrators who are part of the project. It’s pretty clear that TYPO3 has a bright future (have you seen how slick the Aloha editor is?! It’ll be part of the next major TYPO3 release!).
It’s also nice to remember just how large the TYPO3 install base is. Sometimes being in the US it’s easy to forget just how well tested and generally gigantic TYPO3 really is. For instance, did you know that Congstar (a German telecommunications company) is run on TYPO3? Everything from their public facing website, to customer portals, to their e-commerce suite. Living in the Bay Area it can sometimes feel as though we’re surrounded by nothing but a sea of Drupal and WordPress. It was great to be reminded of just how vibrant and powerful the TYPO3 ecosystem really is.
So thanks to everybody who came to our fair city for the conference. I met lots of great new friends I’m looking forward to seeing again next year!
Anybody have any highlights they’d like to share?
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