Finish Setup and Test Your Site

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Set the default time zone for your Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S) site.
Test the Volunteer Jobs Listing page and sign-up form.

Set the Default Time Zone

After all of the heavy data access work from the last unit, this step may seem trivial—but it’s one of those small things that can make a big difference for both you and your volunteers.

Remember in the Volunteer Registration in V4S module when we talked about complications around time zones, especially for events in multiple locations?

Well, now we’ll set the default time zone for the Site Guest User profile. Setting a time zone here makes any new volunteer campaigns and jobs default to this time zone, saving you time when creating new records. Remember, you can still override the default time zone on campaign or volunteer job records to display a different time zone for jobs in other locations.

Our (fictional) nonprofit, No More Homelessness (NMH), is located on the West Coast of the United States, so NMH’s admin, Gorav, sets the default time zone to Pacific Time.

On the Sites page in Setup, click the site label for your Sites Detail page. The label in our example is Volunteers.
On the Site Detail page, click Public Access Settings.
Click the View Users button in the Profile Detail section.
Click Edit next to Site Guest User, Volunteers.
Under Locale Settings, choose the correct time zone from the dropdown list. NMH chooses (GMT-08:00) Pacific Standard Time (America/Los Angeles).
Click Save.

Now all campaigns and volunteer jobs default to the time zone you set, which means you need to set it on those records only if you have an event in a different time zone.

Activate and Test the Site

We’ve completed many steps to enable and create a site, and we’ve made sure that it has access to the data it needs. Now we get to see our hard work in action.

We activated our site earlier, but it never hurts to double-check. You can do that from the Sites page in Setup. If you see an Activate link next to your site, click it now. If you see a Deactivate link, your site is already activated and ready to go.

Let’s test it out. We’ll start by viewing the Jobs Listing page, which shows all the shifts we entered in the previous module.

In Setup, enter Sites in the Quick Find box, then select Sites.
Click the site URL for your site in the Sites table. You’ll see something like this.

Don’t worry, what you’re seeing now is just the standard Under Construction page that we set as the default home page when we first created our site. There’s one more step to see the actual Jobs Listing page.
In your browser’s address bar, add this to the end of your URL: /GW_Volunteers__VolunteersJobListingFS. (Note that there are two underscore characters between Volunteers and VolunteersJobListingFS.)

And, drum roll, please… Here’s the Volunteers Job List page in all its glory. Just look at all of our events grouped by job. At NMH, they need to scroll down to see more volunteer jobs.

A volunteer job with many volunteer shifts on the Jobs Listing page

Not seeing everything you expect? The default configuration for the Volunteer Jobs Listing page only shows shifts scheduled for the current month and the next 2 months. To change the time frame configuration, see the V4S documentation linked in the Resources section.

If you’d like to see a calendar view of the volunteer jobs and shifts you created, add /GW_Volunteers__JobCalendar to your URL. (We’ll explore other pages later.)
The calendar view of NMH’s events

Take a moment to appreciate what you’ve done here!

You’ve created a site that shows all the shifts you entered in Salesforce. And even more exciting, each shift has a sign-up link next to it. We’ll test that out in the next unit.