Salesforce Ideas
Visualforce for Ideas (Ideas Spring '09)
With the Spring '09 release customers have the option of using Visualforce to achieve pixel-level control over the ideas application so that you can match the exact look and feel of your website, whether that be an intranet site or a public customer facing website.
The way it works is that you'll
download a default set of Visualforce pages and corresponding Apex
Classes which make up the Ideas App. In total there are 20+ Visualforce
pages and associated Apex Classes:
Popular Ideas, Recent Ideas, Top All-Time, Recent Comments, Ideas Detail Page, My Activity, My Ideas, My Votes, Recent Replies, Search, Login Pages, Registration Pages, Error Pages...
These are pages that you could build from scratch using Visualforce and Apex but we wanted to help make it easier to get started.
Once you've installed these pages you can then go in and edit the mark-up and CSS to configure the site just the way you like it. Because you have control of the mark-up and CSS, you can move elements around on the page, remove elements all-together, or insert entirely new elements. For example you might want to extend the profile page with fields from the user object or you might want to add a button for report abuse. You might even decide to create entirely new Visualforce page, such as top contributors or about this site.
Creating Visualforce pages is far
more powerful than what you can do with the standard customer portal,
but it will require a web developer who understands CSS, HTML, and
Javascript. Most of the code is actually Apex, but it is a very similar
language to Java.
We recommend that the first pass of customizations are made by modifying the CSS for the Visualforce pages. This provides a good amount of flexibility with little investment. If this is not sufficient, you can go a step further and change the Visualforce markup.
It is also important to note that the templates provide you the source code for the page, so when Salesforce does seasonal releases, we don't inject that new functionality into the page. It is up to you to add that functionality if, when, and where you want it. One of the added benefits of this approach is that your page is stable, meaning that if changes are made from one release to the next, it won't impact your site.
It is also worth noting that in the Spring '09 releases some of the controllers are hardened and some are not. The advantage of the harden controllers is that we can hind the complexity and push upgrades. For example, if we decide that the Activity History Widget should display 180 days vs. 7 days we can make that change on the back end and you'll get it for free. Those controllers which are not hardened will expose the underlying Apex code, but they should work just fine. We encourage you not to alter them.
With regard to custom fields and page
layouts, with Visualforce pages you have to manually insert that field
into the page layout. If want to change an existing field, such as a
pick list, that updates automatically. Community administrators will
continue to use the standard SFDC interface to edit/delete/merge and
set up Ideas configurations and view reports. The custom Visualforce
experience is meant for end users and not the site administrators.
As you can see Visualforce for Ideas introduces a lot of new power and flexibility. We recommend that with this approach you engage our professional services team to help streamline your rollout.
*Note that Visualforce for Ideas will be in Limited Release. Please contact Salesforce.com Professional Services for more information.
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