Create a Site

Learn how to Create a Site in Maica

What is a Site in Salesforce?

In Salesforce, a Site:

Enables you to create public websites and applications that are directly integrated with your Salesforce organisation—without requiring users to log in with a username and password. You can publicly expose any information stored in your organisation through a branded URL of your choice.

Sites are critical for securely sharing data and integrating with external systems while maintaining control and security over the exposed functionality.

To learn more about Sites in Salesforce, click here.

Why are they important in Maica?

In Maica, a Site is essential for enabling successful and automated integrations with external platforms like Xero, Stripe, and NDIS through webhooks.

The Site essentially acts as a public-facing endpoint that the external systems can communicate with to send and receive real-time updates, such as payment confirmations or notification handling. In this context, the Site facilitates the secure exchange of data by exposing specific parts of the Maica environment to these external platforms, allowing them to trigger actions in Maica (e.g., updating participant records or processing payments) without requiring manual intervention.

By using webhooks, the integration becomes more efficient and automated, as events are instantly relayed between systems, ensuring timely and accurate updates across all platforms.

So, before we can configure any integration on Maica, we must ensure our Site is created and set up correctly.

How do I create a Site?

In order to effectively create a Site in your Salesforce instance, please refer the following Salesforce articles:

1. Enable Salesforce Sites

2. Setup Salesforce Sites

3. Create and Edit Salesforce Sites

4. Configure Salesforce Sites

Things to look out for: Sites in Maica

1. Site Fields

Once your Site has been created, there are a few components necessary for ensuring they are successful in Maica and your integrations.

Field	Description
Site Label & Site Name	This is the name of the site as it appears in the user interface. We recommend a generic term to suit all integrations: such as Maica Notifications.
Default Web Address	This is the unique Salesforce Site URL for this site. We recommend a generic term to suit all integrations: such as Notifications.
Active	Ensure this field is checked so the Site is Active upon Save.

In addition, ensure the below boxes are checked and you use the recommended Clickjack Protection Level.

2. Site Timezone

Once you have configured your Site fields and assigned the appropriate naming conventions, it is important to assign the correct timezone to your Site Guest User.

When you create a Salesforce Site, Salesforce automatically generates a Guest User for that site. The guest user profile allows public access to the site for unauthenticated users, such as visitors or external systems interacting with your site.

You do so by heading to the your Site Profile.

To get your Site Profile, follow the below listed steps:

1. Select Your Site: In the list of your sites, find the site that you set up (in our case, the one called Maica Notifications) and click on the Site Label.

2. View the Site Details: On the site details page, click on the Public Access Settings button.

3. Navigate to the Profile: This link will take you to the Site Guest User Profile for that site. You can then click Assigned Users to see the Site Guest User associated with the site.

Once there, select the Full Name in order to assign the correct timezone to your Site Guest User, as shown below.

Maica Notifications Profile is the profile that defines what the guest user can access, including permissions for objects, fields, and other settings.

After selecting your Site Guest User, simply click Edit and change the timezone to Australian Eastern Standard Time (or your relevant Time Zone), as shown below.

Setting the correct timezone for the Site Guest User ensures that data synchronised between Maica and external platforms is timestamped consistently, improving accuracy, compliance, and reliability across both systems.

3. Assign Permission Sets

As well as setting the correct timezone for our Site Guest User, it is important to assign the relevant permission sets in order to make Integrations work seamlessly. You do this from the same Profile as shown above.

Once on the Site Guest User Profile, simply scroll down Permission Set Assignments and click Edit Assignments. Here, you can add the relevant Permissions for your Organisations Integrations, the relevant Permissions are as follows:

Permission Set	Description
Maica - Handle NDIS Notifications	Provides the ability to process the NDIS Notifications (webhooks).
Maica - Pay Invoice
Maica - Handle Xero Notifications	Provides the ability to process the Xero Notifications (webhooks).