There can be a lot to learn to get a Drupal site to read custom objects in Salesforce, that is if you’re not a Salesforce consultant. Salesforce has its own way of doing things, but thankfully it also has a thorough API, a flexible SQL-like query language, and a “Drupal module”:http://drupal.org/project/salesforce that handles accessing the API. We recently worked on a Drupal — Salesforce integration and built two new tools to make the integration easier — “Drush”:http://drupal.org/project/drush integration and “FeedAPI”:http://drupal.org/project/feedapi integration.

Here’s a quick screencast that demonstrates how both work.

The “drush integration”:http://drupal.org/node/447596 is available in the Salesforce module issue queue. Being able to use the command line to query Salesforce has been very useful, and being able to use SOQL queries in conjunction with other unix CLI tools — like grep — has really put it over the top.

The FeedAPI integration provides the ability to very flexibly mirror Salesforce objects in Drupal. I’ll be working a bit more with this code and hope to release it soon.

Building these two integration points was remarkably simple because of the work that had already been put into the “Salesforce module”:http://drupal.org/project/salesforce, “Drush”:http://drupal.org/project/drush, and “FeedAPI”:http://drupal.org/project/feedapi.