You probably already have an OpenID account but just didn’t know about it.

Examples of OpenID providers are Google and Yahoo! (if you have one of these accounts you already have an OpenID). This is great but if you want the flexibility to use your own, easy to remember domain you don’t have to set up your site to be an OpenID provider. You can simply choose a 3rd party you’re already using for other things.

This approach means you’re in complete control of your online identity and can easily see who has access to your credentials. If you’re no longer happy with them, you can simply revoke access…easy! Watch this all in action in the video below.

The code you’ll need to embed in your site’s homepage is:

So, if you’re a website owner and thinking about authentication, reducing the friction created by the sign up process is very important. Implement OpenID and as you can see in the video, your users will find it very easy to log in and start using your service.

Salesforce needs a single

pair for each of the values in the same select. So, we need to create something that looks like

The php implode() function is very helpful here so we could just pass the array from the form to a php file and do something like

It would be sensible to urlencode the values of the form data to make sure it arrives safely. So, we need to urlencode the values after they’ve been imploded. If we simply urlencode the array, we no longer have an array and it’s pretty useless.

To send data from the website to Salesforce, I pre-processed the data and sent the request ‘manually’ so my chain of events looked something like this:

Form on website >> php data manipulation >> php creation of POST >> Salesforce.com object

If you have any tips about integrating your website with Salesforce, please drop me a line.