Getting Started With Communities

Communities is becoming a necessity to manage customers and partners and why not, it's easy that way isn't it? We (at Briskminds) are currently handling around 10 active projects where we need to implement the communities, but of-course we were also new to it few months back.

We've followed some simple steps to enable and use it, and would like to share that with my fellow community members as well. Let's explore more how we can enable and customize our community.

How to enable communities

1. Go to Setup > App Setup > Customize > Communities > Settings
2. Enable the checkbox "Enable communities"

Register For Domain

Once enabled the communities it will ask for the domain name, show in picture. Once registered for the domain you can now create your community, by clicking on “New Community” (Customize | Communities | Manage Communities, then click New Community) button.

Allowing profile to login in community

1. Once you create new community then click on edit.
2. It will show the screen as displayed in picture (please remember this, as we will refer the same Edit again and again)

1. Click on “Members” tab
2. Once clicked on “Members” tab, it will show the screen as displayed in picture

1. Here you can enable profiles and give permissions to users
2. If you are creating a community user then make sure profile assigned to that user is listed here (in “Selected Profile”) else user will not be able to do anything with the email which will be received after new user creation.

Allowing Tabs and Pages

1. Click on “Edit” against your community
2. Now click on “Tabs and Pages”, it will show the screen displayed in picture

1. Select “Use Salesforce.com tabs” (let’s not dive into using site.com as it is a separate topic)
2. Then you can select the tabs which you want to show to the community users
3. Note – First tab selected will be the landing tab

Custom Branding

1. Click on “Edit” against your community
2. Now click on “Branding”, it will show the screen displayed in picture

1. From here you can customize your headers and footers (formats are mentioned in picture) (which will be displayed on the native screens, and depends if you’ve applied on custom pages/tabs) and color theme to the community

Customize Login Page

1. Click on “Edit” against your community
2. Now click on “Login Page”, it will show the screen displayed in picture

1. Now you can give your company logo in login page. Whenever user open your community link, then you can show your company logo in header and show your content in footer.
2. If you need to completely change the login page to your visualforce page then we need to follow some more steps mentioned below :

(i) Create an apex class and visualforce page you want to show as your login page. Keep it simple for now.

Apex Class :

global with sharing class CustomLoginController 
{
  global String username {get; set;}
  global String password {get; set;}
  global CustomLoginController () {}
  
  global PageReference login() 
{
  return Site.login(username, password, null); 
  } 
}

Visualforce Page (please change this according to your need) :

Login to Community



Username


Password






Forgot your password? | Join our Community


Powered by Cloudcatamaran

(ii) Now go toSetup>Customize>Communities>Manage Comunities and click on force.com link as shown below

(iii) Now scroll down and click on edit "Site Visualforce Pages"

(iv) Now add the custom page you just created to "Enabled Visualforce Pages"

(v) Once saved, click on Edit as shown below :

(vi) Now add “CustomLogin” page as shown below. And save it.

(vii) Now click on "URL Redirect" as shown below :

(viii) Now add partial source URL (Ex. /support/login ) in Source URL textbox and partial target URL in (Ex. /support/CustomLogin) in Target URL textbox and click save.

Create New User

1. Create a new account (Go to your org as internal user and then click on account tab and then new)
2. Create a new contact record under newly created account (Go to the newly create account and then click on new on contact related list)
3. Open contact record and click on “Manage External User” button (as shown in picture) and then click on “Enable Customer User” link, it will redirect you to user record

   4. When you click on Save button (on new user screen), please ensure that the current logged in user should have a role to create this new user otherwise it will give you error.

Publish It

Once you are done with everything and ready to use your community then you will click on publish as shown in picture

(From Setup, click Customize > Communities > Manage Communities. Click on edit button in the front of your community and then click on Publish button.)

Now you are all set to go. Get started with this hot topic, and please do share your thoughts or problem you may face.

How Can I Become A MVP (Force.com)

Recently my MVP title is renewed (Extra! Announcing our newest and renewed Force.com MVPs) and this question bothered many from time to time "How can I become a MVP"? 

Don't focus on how to become a MVP, focus only on the motive behind the program. It is stated that "Force.com MVP program recognizes outstanding contributors and technological leaders in the Force.com cloud platform ecosystems. Force.com MVPs are being called out for willingly sharing their expertise with others, demonstrating stewardship of the community in which they play an integral part, advancing the community body of knowledge and strengthening the developer network." 

Now there are multiple ways to do this, let's talk about some of them: 

1) Contribution via discussion boards, which is the heart of community. We've multiple discussion boards where you can share your knowledge with other community members.

• Force.com discussion boards
• Stackexchange
• Customer Community

2) Evangelism of the technology through independent publication such as blogs/whitepapers/FB Page 

3) Contribution to open sources. If you've ever thought about sharing some code samples or some big projects so don't let it be restricted to only your personal blogs. Make them live here:

• Force.com Cookbook
• Force.com CodeShare
• Share your Ideas

4) Get Social and stay connected with other peers on social sites like

• Twitter : Follow official accounts @forcedotcom @salesforce and use #askforce if you need any help or you want to help the community
• Facebook : Like the official page and stay connected with the latest news and events
• LinkedIn etc.

5) Participate as much as you can via attending live webinars (you can get the information from social sites or here), online events (where you get chance to win some cool stuff), online challenges like this 

6) Participate in local developer user group meetings. You can get the list of all developer user groups here.

7) Participate in big events like Dreamforce, Cloudstock etc.

List never ends and it's benefits too, like by doing all this

• Your knowledge will be increased.
• Your networking will be strong
• Will be acknowledged globally
• Significant increase in offers from companies
• Domain will not be restricted any more
• After actively participating in events your wardrobe will be full of some cool stuff like Jackets, T-Shirts, Caps, Bags, Trophies, Books, Hoodies

Above benefits are for sure, and if you are entitled as MVP then there are some additional benefits to above:

• You'll get sponsored trips to SF for events like MVP Summit
• You'll get free passes to Dreamforce
• Highlighted community profile, (here is mine)
• Early access to feature previews and releases, with direct feedback to the PMs on these products
• Access to chatter groups where all MVPs jam together

I don't know where to stop...so now you have the links and I hope you know what to do. GOOD LUCK!

Make our community rock!!

Binding Values of Map on Visualforce Page

I was totally messed up with this and thanks to Bob Buzzard for providing me the solution to it.


What exactly the problem is? I was trying to display values of Map on visualforce page. This code snippet will help you to understand more.

<apex:repeat value="{!MyMap}" var="M">
 <apex:repeat value="{!MyMap[M]}" var="temp">
  <apex:outputLabel value="{!temp.Test_Curr__c}"/>
 </apex:repeat>
</apex:repeat>

"MyMap" is in my controller having list of account (Map<String , List<Account>>). I just want to bind the currency field value of account with outPutField like this :

<apex:repeat value="{!MyMap}" var="M">
 <apex:repeat value="{!MyMap[M]}" var="temp">
         <apex:outputField value="{!temp.Test_Curr__c}"/>
 </apex:repeat>
</apex:repeat>

But compiler gifted me this : "Error: Could not resolve the entity from <apex:outputField> value binding '{!temp.Test_Curr__c}'. outputField can only be used with SObject fields."


Now it is mandatory for me to bind the value with outPutField as I want the formatting of currency field on my visualforce page.


Using outPutLabel doesn't provide formatting either :

<apex:repeat value="{!MyMap}" var="M">
 <apex:repeat value="{!MyMap[M]}" var="temp">
  <apex:outputLabel value="{!temp.Test_Curr__c}"/>
 </apex:repeat>
</apex:repeat>

So finally I need the Community help, and trust me it is the best place to get your answers quickly.


Workaround for this is using <apex:column> as it provides the sObject field behaviour. So my final code looks something like this :

<apex:pageBlockTable value="{!MyMap}" var="M">
 <apex:repeat value="{!MyMap[M]}" var="temp">
  <apex:column value="{!temp.Test_Curr__c}" />
 </apex:repeat>
</apex:pageBlockTable>

For reference click here to get community post.


Hope this flaw will be fixed soon as there might be some cases where we do not want to use pageBlockTabel.


Cheers