In the crowded field of customer relationship management (CRM) systems, SugarCRM stands out—not only for its modular design, but also for the ease with which you can develop, customize, and extend your CRM applications. This concise book provides a thorough overview of the development tools and APIs available in SugarCRM 6.2, showing both developers and nondevelopers alike how to use them to build a sample application step-by-step.
You'll learn how to bend and twist SugarCRM’s extensible MVC framework to create custom applications, including solutions for automating your business that go beyond traditional CRMs.
Learn how SugarCRM modules interact with one another through data relationships
Build your CRM application with SugarCRM’s GUI developer tools—without touching code
Use built-in design templates with Module Builder to design new CRM modules
Customize modules with the Studio tool to add new fields or additional relationships between modules
Automate common and tedious tasks within your application, using custom PHP code with SugarCRM's powerful API
Integrate external applications into your CRM solution through SugarCRM's web services API
Chapter 1 What is SugarCRM?
A breakdown of the editions
What you need to install SugarCRM
What do you get with SugarCRM?
Summary
Chapter 2 Developing on the SugarCRM platform
Customizing the out-of-the-box modules with Studio
Building new modules using Module Builder
Defining Workflows
Summary
Chapter 3 Building your application using the Sugar GUI Developer tools
Application overview
Customizing out-of-the-box modules with Studio
New modules to create with Module Builder
Summary
Chapter 4 Diving deeper with custom code
Bring the new happens with the conference into the Activity Stream
Automate speaker acceptance and rejection
Calculating Average Session Feedback Score
Summary
Chapter 5 Integrating your application with the outside world
John Mertic is a software engineer at SugarCRM. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Kent State University, has several years of experience with PHP web applications. An avid writer, he has been published in php|architect, IBM Developerworks, and in the Apple Developer Connector. He has also contributed to many open source projects, most notably the PHP project where he is the creator and maintainer of the PHP Windows Installer.
