Chapter 14. Taking Your Application Public with Force Platform Sites

Force Platform organizations contain valuable information about partners, solutions, products, users, ideas, and other business data. Some of this information would be useful to people outside your organization, but only users with the right access and permissions can view and use it. In the past, to make this data available to the general public, you had to set up a Web server, create custom Web pages (JSP, PHP, or other), and perform API integration between your site and your organization. Additionally, if you wanted to collect information using a Web form, you had to program your pages to perform data validation.

With Force Platform Sites, you no longer have to do any of those things. Force Platform Sites enable you to create public websites and applications that are directly integrated with your Force Platform organization—without requiring users to log in with a username and password.

In this chapter, you will walk through an example of how you can use sites to create a public job posting site from the data in your Force Platform organization. The examples include information on developing the Visualforce pages you need, customizing the site’s look and feel, configuring your site to accept online applications and resumes, allowing online registration and login to the Customer Portal, and testing your site.