My work on the Force.com Site I built recently was listed on the “Sites Gallery” by Salesforce.com.

Check it out – http://developer.force.com/sitesgallery

Check it out – http://datacenters.digitalrealtytrust.com/

I learned a lot in making my first Force.com Site: a lot of apex, a lot of visualforce and a lot Amazon Web Services.

This Force.com Site consisted of:

• 3 visualforce pages
• 1 apex class
• 1 apex test class
• 2 custom objects and a ton of custom fields
• all images and videos were stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and served through Cloudfront
• most CSS and javascript files were stored on AWS and served through Cloudfront
• uses JW Player (http://www.longtailvideo.com/) to play the video
• uses jquery for the mouse over popup

Learns:

• the rich-text fields are still in “beta” for a reason – they don’t seem to work on visualforce pages yet
• writing test methods for an apex class is a pain! – start by writing the test method first, then write the production method

I’m glad to have this experience under my belt. In fact, I’m proud enough of the Site that the local SFDC User Group is letting me present it (and my experience) to the group at the next meeting.