Tom Mollerus' Weblog

Today I'm in San Francisco at the Dreamforce conference, which is Salesforce's annual conference. I'm starting with an all-day session called Visualforce for Developers, where I hope to learn more about how to write native Apex code that will run right in the Salesforce application. So far, I've only been able to call iframes which call ColdFusion pages to give people access to custom features. (This via URL-based "s-controls", which are a Salesforce-approved way to call external code.) The CF code, while running on its own server, does interact with Salesforce via Tom de Manincor's wonderful salesForceCFC.

I'll be very interested to see, as I learn native Salesforce APIs such as Apex code or Visualforce, just how I choose to interact with our ColdFusion system. I'm particularly interested in learning how to write more of the display code directly in Salesforce while having the web service calls go from Salesforce to our own systems-- the exact opposite of what we have now. As I learn more in the next few days, I'll be posting what I learn.

I couldn't help but laugh over some of this collection the MSNBC staff put together of comments on recent political ads, especially Obama's infomercial: [ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/27471699#27471699 ]

Happy Halloween to all! My dog Cleo has started the festivities early here in Needham; not only is she wearing her bat wings already (thanks to the kids), but she's managed to eat a Twix bar and Tootsie Pop, wrappers and all (again, thanks to the kids).

Brian Rinaldi has announced that Flex Camp Boston is back for 2008 and is now accepting registrations.

Last year's event was fantastic, and this year promised to be just as good. Speakers include Tim Buntel, Christophe Coenraets, Andrew Powell, Jeff Tapper, Brian O'Connor, and Mike Nimer, representing the top companies in the industry such as Adobe, Universal Mind, Digital Primates, IBM, and Brightcove. See the agenda for full details.

The early bird rate of $30 is only available before December 1st, but keep in mind that this event sold out in under a month last year, so I suggest you register as soon as you can.

When: Dec 12, 2008 from 8am - 5pm
Where: Bentley College in Waltham
Website: http://www.flexcampboston.com/
Registration URL: http://flexcampboston2008.eventbrite.com/

I want to thank everyone who joined us last night at our Open Mic night with the Boston CFUG. We had a great turnout and a very good response on the open presentation format. People liked it so much that we're going to do another at some point in the future. Also, congratulations to the winner of last night's raffle for Adobe software-- Isaac Dealey. Isaac is presenting his onTap framework to the CFUG during our December meeting.

For those of you who want to get more information on the projects that were presented last night, here are the links from the speakers:

Have you ever entered content into a wiki using the Wikitext markup language? Wikitext was created with the goal of being simpler to write than HTML. That may be so, but that still doesn't make it easy, especially the first time you try to use it, and especially if you're a non-technical user. So what should you do if you want your user base, all of whom are decidedly not technical, to actually start using the wiki you created for them instead of ignoring it because they don't want to bother learning a markup language themselves?

That's the question we had to ask ourselves at work as we configured a wiki for our sales team, who, while a nice bunch of folks, isn't going to learn the wikitext markup specification just to make us in the operations team feel happy. Luckily, we found a better way to let sales enter content content into our wiki.

Continue reading "WYSIWYG editor for wikis" »