salesforce.com plugin for website

Question

There is a company that uses salesforce software to keep track of all customers and the performance of the employees. I am building a points website, which is about the manager rewarding points to employees for a job well done. I want to integrate the info from salesforce software database about the employees and present it on my website so that the manager can see the number of deals closed by each employee and accordingly allocate points to that person. is there any kind of a plug-in or something like that? if not, how can i achieve this? My website is a cms, built on php.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Check out the PHP Toolkit, which is a PHP wrapper around the salesforce API.

Answer 2

Be aware, there are some quirks and it's some bulky functionality. Salesforce limits the amount of hits you can have on the webservice, so you may need to do a cron-based "grab" of info and store to your site at various intervals. You'll get a rude awakening when you're testing and run out of connections for the day (not applicable to people who pay the premium level of Salesforce) It's also rather slow and has a propensity to timeout often....so be prepared to write code to handle the exceptions that will be caused.

Your server will need to have CURL installed and properly functioning.

Good luck!

Answer 3

The best way to handle this situation is to import the enterprise or partner WSDL into your PHP CMS. This will enable you to make webservice calls to Salesforce.com and access almost all of the data sitting on the Salesforce.com server.

It'll also enable you to write back to Salesforce.com servers. There is very good documentation and code samples out there try this link first:

http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Web_Services_API#PHP

Hope this helps!