Salesforce.com and the Site.com Content Management System – Part 1

There is a content management system feature of Salesforce.com that doesn’t get that much attention: Site.com

Site.com can be used to host public facing websites on the Salesforce.com platform. It is rather lightweight and not really intended for complex content management requirements.

Currently there are some limits. All non-Development editions are limited to 40GB of bandwidth every day, with between 500,000 and 1,000,000 daily views depending on the edition you are using. This actually covers quite a lot of small to medium publishing scenarios. If you think this could be too low for you then you should put some serious consideration into a higher end CMS product.

There are also no workflows for publishing, which is rather important to those who want to move the mechanics of publishing to the realm of the Business User.

There are some help pages on the subject, but I thought it would help people generally to show the process and give some visualization.

In this article I will just show the basics of getting started with a brand new site.

Firstly you need a Salesforce edition with sites.com enabled:

Then Navigate to Setup -> Administration Setup -> Manage Users -> Users .

Go ahead and edit the user you want for this. There are two types, which are ‘Contributor’ and ‘Publisher’.

Obviously in a ‘real world’ scenario you almost certainly want the roles of contributor and publisher separate, with the publisher reviewing and giving their approval for the content to be published.

Click on the ‘Site.com’ app and click the ‘New’ button:

You will then get a simple dialog box for creating a blank new site, or import an existing site or template. Here is an example how to create a new site:

This will then create a completely empty site ready for you to work with:

My next article will show some more details around creating and publishing content.

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