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Community contributions
Jantcu built the salesforce_term_ref module as part of this project.
Jantcu worked with the City of Boston to integrate their affordable housing information, which is stored in a Salesforce database, with their public website built on Drupal 7. We created a persistent feed using OAuth2 that updates information in real time on the site when records in the database are created, updated, or deleted. We helped their team re-architect their database structure to streamline the import process from approximately 50,000 records to only several hundred. This drastically improved the data transfer process and cut down the total import time by over 90%. We also created a user interface that allows Boston’s target audience to filter and sort records based on several different types of criteria in order to find the information that is most relevant to them. We recommended and implemented a system for storing custom objects within the Drupal database to avoid interfering with Boston.gov’s existing caching layer, which improved site performance.
About the project
The goal of the project was to provide a transparent and accessible means for constituents to view The City of Boston's affordable housing information online. We needed a way for users to be able to quickly search through a large data set, so we imported Salesforce objects into custom Drupal content types and leveraged the Views module's robust filtering capabilities to provide this experience natively. We also wanted to retain the internal workflow of the city's Department of Neighborhood Development, so we set up a system that pulls data based on their approval process.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal is the underlying CMS that boston.gov uses to manage it's public facing content across a variety of departments. Drupal provides enterprise user management with varying levels of permissions and content moderation with review/approval workflows that are required to manage the large database of information stored in the system.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The Salesforce suite of modules provided a sustainable way to sync objects between the city's Salesforce and Drupal databases. Jantcu wrote a custom module, Salesforce Term Reference, in order to match incoming terms to those stored in an existing Drupal taxonomy.
