Salesforce Ideas
The New Visualforce Base Theme is the Real Deal
The new Visualforce Theme is now available in limited release. For those who have been tracking Ideas closely, this is the missing piece which makes the "My Starbucks Idea" or "Dell IdeaStorm" experience available to virtually anybody. The Visualforce Theme is a set of pages which are installed as an AppExchange package. I gave it a try the other day, and while I'm not a developer, I was amazed how quickly I had a professional looking site up and running. To see the Visualforce Base Theme in action check out the new lookatideas.com site or flip through the presentation below.
Can I Create Multiple Sites with the Base Theme?
The base theme is not set up to handle multi-site administration. That is not to say you couldn't modify it to do so, but it'd take some work. If you had one external community, you could still run your internal communities or portal communities. You just can't run multiple communities with the Visualforce UI using the out-of the box template.
Can I Add Custom Fields to Page Layouts?
You can add custom fields to page layouts but because they are Visualforce Pages and not part of the standard salesforce app there isn't a WYSIWYG Editor.
How Do Upgrades Work?
When you install the base theme you are installing a AppExchange package. Parts of that package are managed (you can't modify them but they are upgradable) and some are unmanaged (you can edit the source code, but we can't upgrade them.) This means that when Salesforce does a release and adds features to the application you won't always receive them automatically. In some respects that is a good thing because we won't break your custom UI by injecting a new feature. Eventually though you'll probably want to take advantage of the new features e come out with. You can manually add the feature in and QA your custom code or you can upgrade to a clean version of the new base them. That's why we recommend deviating as little as possible so it doesn't take much work to re-implement if you decide to do so 6-12 months down the road.
Does the Base Theme Work for Internal or Intranet Communities?
Yes it does. You could have your employees login to salesforce.com and click on a link in the sidebar that launches your ideas community. That is the easiest approach but it isn't the ideal user experience. If you want employees to be able to browse the site without logging in, you'll want to implement single sign-on authentication. Outside of that the only other change needed to make the base theme work for employee communities is to remove the "update your profile link" from the user profile. That link is designed to work for customer portal users and isn't needed for employee communities.
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