For the Force.com developer hackathon, I developed an integration toolkit between 37Signals‘ Basecamp application for project management and Salesforce.com. This little bit of work earned me the top prize in the Dreamforce 2009 Hackathon so a big thanks to Salesforce.com for putting on the event. It has easily become my favorite part of the Dreamforce conference.

Salesforce.com, in its simplest form, allows for the tracking of business leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities and its development platform extends its functionality to include pretty much whatever a developer can come up with. For many organizations, these salesforce opportunities represent products that are being purchased by another company. What if, however, you are a professional services group? Your services are products in a sense, however the native salesforce.com functionality of products is fairly limited for use for professional services.

Enter Basecamp
Basecamp allows you to manage companies, projects and the various messages, to-do lists, milestones, files and time tracking for each project.

Your Basecamp is in my Salesforce
This Basecamp+Salesforce.com toolkit allows you to tie Salesforce opportunities to Basecamp projects right out of the box. The toolkit includes methods for all of the Basecamp API methods so developers can build their own applications using whichever Salesforce.com objects and business logic they desire using visualforce and apex code.

Due to the time constraints on the Hackathon competition, the toolkit requires a little bit of work on my part before I deem it ready for releasing to the Force.com Code Share.

Features

• Tie your Salesforce user account to your Basecamp user account
• Associate opportunities to existing Basecamp projects
• Create new Basecamp projects from within Salesforce
• Create, read, edit and delete project messages, to-do lists and milestones
• Manage completion of to-do lists

Considerations
Both Basecamp and Salesforce have methods for alerting users regarding upcoming tasks. The initial version of this integration relies on Basecamp’s notifications, which can be selected from within Salesforce.

Roadmap
Due to the short timeframe provided during the Dreamforce Hackathon there are a few Basecamp functional areas that were not written into the toolkit. I plan to add these items soon but they may not be in the first version released to the code share.

• Time tracking
• Writeboards
• Files

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with either Salesforce.com, Dreamforce, 37Signals or Basecamp.

Want to help save the planet? @edadkins and I created Globes for the Globes (NSFW 18+) to help spread tips that will help the earth.

Ed already wrote about why we made the website, which you can read here. I wanted to quickly talk about what went into making it happen and why we used WordPress to power the whole thing.

WordPress is obviously a blogging platform but the fact that it is lightweight and customization is only limited to the developer’s imagination and knowledge of PHP and the WordPress core.

Plugins used:

TDO Mini Forms
Used for image submission. TDO Mini Forms takes the content entered on the G4tG submission page and creates a draft post in WordPress. We are alerted of new posts and can approve or reject those posts.

Popular Posts + Post-Plugin Library
Used for displaying the most viewed images in the sidebar. This plugin and the post-plugin library offers a very robust set of features for filtering and displaying your posts based on related content, highest number of page views and more.

Ad-minister
Used to display our Partner Sites. Ad-minister is another plugin with a very rich feature set including the ability to track ads and an ad’s individual cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression(CPM) in terms of impressions and clicks.

Akismet
Our spam fighting power, thanks to WordPress

I’m 18 or Over

Due to the content of the website, we decided to hide the actual images until someone clicks on the “I’m 18 or over” button. We’re using Javascript to set a cookie indicating that the user wishes to turn off the image filter. Setting cookies via Javascript is pretty simple and because they are set in the browser, we can access the cookies later via PHP for showing, or in this case, hiding certain content including the “Flag This” links, most viewed images in the sidebar, and of course our unicorn gatekeeper.

The ability to set, retrieve, and manage cookies within a WordPress theme is a pretty slick way to show content or display options to a viewer. As soon as I get some downtime, I’m going to make it into a plugin that will allow cookies and related template tags, such as <?php if(is_18()) ?> to be created through the admin panel for use in existing themes.

Flag Content

Once the image filters are turned off, each image also has a “Flag this” link that sends a notification to us indicating that someone believes the content to be offensive or have comprised our system somehow.

This was a really fun project to work on and Georgette and Shone over at Bohocrush (NSFW 18+) are awesome as always to work with. We look forward to more community and collaborative efforts in the future.