Project of the Month - April 2007

SugarCRM Module Builder

Description of project

Trove Info

Why are you a leading contributor in the SugarCRM community? What are the benefits that you experience from your involvement?

Working in the Quality area for many years sharpens your sight for good things. The dynamics of Sugar forums, with committed users and developers pushing for better and more useful applications is a dream come true.

I could not let it pass by the chance of applying a reality check to my ideas about CRM - and the benefits are many - user acceptance tests and feedback, idea improvement, diverse environments testing your application - almost 40,000 members helping you - and all for free!

What other projects have you been involved with on SugarForge.org?

My first taste of Sugar was the Support Dashboard, a services support focus for the original dashboard. It generated many situations I have never dreamed of, and people also contributed by correcting errors, repacking the application for other Sugar flavors. It only proves that it is a real cooperating environment.

Working with those simple changes inside Sugar made me gather problems and solutions on how to create a new module. This was the seed for another project - Knowledge Base - a small module of two linked sub-modules. Once more, the community showed its strength - testing, correcting, suggesting, repacking, solving problems by themselves and improving the application. The module had a life of its own

What inspired you to create this project?

I think you should use everything (good and bad) to inspire you for improvement, but Sugar has two special ones:

• A high quality architecture and implementation that always teaches you "how to" in many ways, dealing with state of the art technologies.
• Almost nonexistent internal documentation, which is being built step by step by the community's hard work.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

Creating a new module by cutting and pasting existing modules is a torture Sugar should not impose on its developers. The time one wastes with fixing too much cuts or doing too little pasting is unacceptable for a world class software like Sugar, but it is also an opportunity. That's why the Module Builder is there, isn't it?

Is there anything that the users should know about your module?

The Module Builder's main objective is not to turn business people in programmers, but to give them a chance to create solutions from their point of view.

Sugar's nicely structured implementation gives us the chance of inventing new uses for the application, if one knows which nuts and bolts to turn. Module Builder use constructors for this tasks.

Think about constructors as small robots that know about HTML, PHP, Javascript, Ajax, XML, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle and a myriad of other state of the art IT technologies. This is what the Sugar team is doing for us. The 'robots' just rebuild all of it in human terms, with a nice interface that can be used as a production line to get the results business people needs.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

If it weren't for the community, I never would have guessed what the users needed. So please, participate, cooperate and send your feedback, suggestions, and ideas. I could not ask for a better help.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

As the saying goes, "one picture is worth a thousand words". So, my next module will be a Dashboard Builder (it is becoming a family). I think it will be an easier and more powerful way to create the data visualization you need from the ground up, helped by the small 'robots'.