Integration of salesforce in Drupal

In this Blog we are going to see how to integrate Salesforce in Drupal, prerequistes  are Salesforce developer account, Salesforce module installed in Drupal CMS.The integration of Salesforce with your Drupal has so many benefits as it helps sales and marketing to work efficiently, 
below are the integration steps. Step 1 Login your Salesforce account.Step 2 Follow the steps:

           Setup->Apps->App manager->New connected App

Follow the steps as shown in the screenshot:

Step 3 Now you can see connected app form, select required fields.

3.1 Basic information: Provide basic information about your app. 

3.2 API (Enable OAuth setting): OAuth (Open Authorization) gives access to resources without revealing user credentials to apps and end user's account information can be used by third-party services. Select setting checkbox. 

Step 4 Check whether the setting is selected or not as it toggles a form with some other required fields. 

Step 5 Enter the callback URL “https://www.yourdomain.com/salesforce/oauth_callback”.

Step 6 Select other fields as per your requirement and process it. Wait for 2-10 minutes before using your app. Now continue the process. Here you will get the consumer key and secret key (these keys are required to connect Drupal to Salesforce). Now you can use the connected app on your Drupal website.

Salesforce module:

Download Salesforce module and install it on your Drupal website. Also, download and install dependent modules like key & encrypt.

Let’s check out the submodules in Salesforce and what they do: 

• Salesforce: OAUTH2 authorization, wrapper around REST API.
• Salesforce Mapping: Maps Drupal entities to Salesforce fields, including field level mapping.
• Salesforce Push: Pushes Drupal entity updates in to Salesforce.
• Salesforce Pull: Pulls Salesforce object updates into Drupal on cron run.
• Salesforce Encrypt: This module is dependent on two other module Encrypt & Key so make sure these are installed. Module required for access and refresh token with security.

Setting up Salesforce on Drupal website: 

Step 1 Go to Configuration->Salesforce->Salesforce Authorization 

Step 2 Add the oAuth configuration setting here

Create Salesforce mapping: 

Before Salesforce mapping, make sure what exactly are you looking for. 

Scenario:

Let’s map out basic information, like first name, last name, email of Drupal users to Salesforce and push them to CRM tool. 

Follow this path (admin/structure/salesforce/mappings) to get a form similar to the shown below.

Now fill the list of values: 

• Label: Label of the mapping.
• Drupal Entity: Select users in both of the fields “Drupal Entity Type” and “User Bundle” in order to map out Drupal users. 
• Salesforce object: Here the selected value should be contacted only.
• Action Trigger: Ones you create a user on Drupal site, use that as a contact in Salesforce tool. For this, select all the data push actions, like insert, update, delete.

Now select Upsert key and Mapped fields.

Upsert key: By setting Upsert key on Salesforce, you can prevent data duplicacy.Mapped fields: Fill the following columns. Property: Listed Drupal fieldsSalesforce field: Listed Salesforce fieldsDirection: There are three directions on the radio button. Here you can see the mapped data that will be updated on Salesforce or on your Drupal site or will synchronize on both. Your mapped field data depends on this setting. Operations: If you don’t want to map this field then delete it by selecting the ‘delete field option’.I have added Email as an Upsert key and for direction field, select “Drupal to Salesforce”.
Testing Proccess As follows:Steps 1 Create a user from admin.Note: Salesforce module will automatically push the data on CRM with contacts.  Step 2 Run cron directly to update data with Salesforce contact by using the following path: /admin/config/system/cron 

How to choose best content management systems for web development

Indeed, there are great content management systems (CMS) available. The process of selecting an apt CMS that best suits one Business prospective is de facto a tedious task to carry out. Every Business requires a solution that addresses the challenges in present and is better aligned to ever changing dynamic business needs to make it future proof. There are a number of major factors and aspects that equip us with to take an informed decision from the available open source solutions.

The major aspects that are considered and come very frequently de facto are:

Support & Stability

The massive community size of the open source vendor is one of the best factors; we should look forward to before making a decision. There are other factors that add up to the decision making are; how large are their forums, how well are there documentation and what are the support options available.

The proprietary systems are preferred over open source just because of the fact that they offer 24/7 support and thereby is most considerable aspects among the folk. There is another prospect of open source which we are not aware of, that some of them offer similar support as proprietary systems do. There are popular proprietary systems like Jahia, Hippo and Magnolia which offer open source versions of their products as well.

The large community of Open Source and their large forums provides thousands of advanced functionalities, documentation, technical articles and people help us to fix the issues and extending the functionalities.

The large community of open source system and availability of code to outside world; helps developers around the world in extending and improving it. This helps identifying the anomalies and rectifying it for being used by the community. It leads to production of innovative tools, technologies, solutions, infrastructure and benchmarking best practices. Which is not in case of proprietary systems as it is motivated by a single owner.

Flexibility and Customization

Expanding a proprietary system is de facto more difficult due to the unavailability of freely available code. Using an Open Source System one can do Research & Development to produce Products & Services that can facilitate and support mission-critical business functions.

Before making a selection to any open source systems, we should analyze their documentation, best practices and coding standards they follow. What is the release process they follow before publishing any plugins or modules to the community? How frequently the products and services are being updated. Changelogs of the product blogs are another parameter for it as less updated products and services may have potential risk of making the system vulnerable.

Security

Security is the first and foremost factor, which the industry folk emphasize the most. It’s a common perception that Open Source systems have potentially risk to security threats by an adversary.

AugusteKerckhoff’s Principle in late 19th century gave his opinion in context of design principles for cipher, one of the most important was:

The cipher method must not be required to be secret, and it must be able to fall into the hands of the enemy without inconvenience.

Today, Kerckhoff’s Principle is understood advocating the published designs as it go public scrutiny and are therefore likely to be stronger. Thereby security is much higher after it has been extensively studied and has withstood may attack attempts and known publicly. As it is better that security flaws are revealed by ethical hackers and made public than having the flaws known only to malicious parties.

Public design enables the establishment of standards. It may be dangerous to use a proprietary system as it is designed in secret by some organization. Thus it is easy to find exploits in Open Source and becomes a strong point advocating that it is less likely to be attacked as there are frequent security updates and patches by the community.

Cost

It is one of the most important factors along with security in making a selection. It is also a common misconception while giving preference to Open source over proprietary system that it may cost less. It depends as the cost solely doesn’t depend on mere selection of Open Source system. Cost depends on development, design, management and deployment costs as well.

Open Source system provide a basic infrastructure on top which it requires customization, whereas proprietary system comes up with on the go solution and requires less customization. The major cost associated with Open source system is that having well versed developers and support costs and most of the training activities can be learnt online at reasonable cost or at no cost.

 In Proprietary system the cost lies in licensing, training, development and support. 

Not only Proprietary systems should be given preference but also Open Source systems may fit the business needs and will remain an apt alternative to it.

Why use Drupal over Wordpress?

• Wordpress was designed only to be a blog with some easy add-ons.
• Drupal was designed to be more of a generalist: it’s for making ‘anything’ and is far more robust.
• Wordpress could be the better choice for blogs since it is better at being a blog than Drupal.  This is something of debate.
• Wordpress is still a sound choice of CMS for SEO and security; so if wordpress satisfies a simpler project’s requirements then by all means use it- it is easier and faster to set up than Drupal.
• Wordpress is not designed to be highly scalable to many simultaneous users, nor does it have flexible roles, permissions, extensible content types, nor does it have plentiful well-tested, quality add-ons.  It has a few and a lot of really poor plugins.
• Caveat: Trying to force Wordpress to do something it cannot do easily with very popular plug-ins can be worse than suffering the learning curve of Drupal.
• It has superior session handling for a CMS.
• It has superior security.
• It is a more consistent, reliable and flexible framework for development.
• It is considered better for SEO from our research.
• It uses a ‘separation of concerns’ architecture to cleanly and consistently separate structure, function, form, and presentation in layers (ie: php from data as db/xml, layout and presentation as html and css).  
• It heavily uses ‘defaults overrides’ in code in the form of hooks and in themes in the form of templates.  This makes it extremely flexible.
• Other CMS’es do a very very bad job of at least one of the above.
• Drupal has a steeper learning curve than wordpress or Joomla.
• Drupal and it’s developers make no excuse for this fact- it is a robust, flexible tool
• That said, the drupal community is constantly addressing usability and user-experience issues because they want the industry market share.