SugarCRM Developer's Manual: Customize and extend SugarCRM

Dr. Mark Alexander Bain first started customizing CRM systems back in the mid '90s when he was team leader for Vodafone's Cascade project – the team took the 'out-of-the-box' Clarify CRM and turned it into a radio base station planning application, complete with a workflow engine for passing jobs between the different departments involved in the planning, building, and implementation of a radio network. Since then he's lectured at the University of Central Lancashire, and currently Mark writes articles on all things Linux and Open Source for Linux Format, Newsforge.com and Linux Journal. SugarCRM customization, therefore, seems the obvious choice for this, his second book, since it combines Mark's knowledge of working with commercial CRMs and the Open Source philosophy. Mark works from his home on the edge of the Lake District in the UK, where he lives with his wife, two dogs and two cats, and gets the odd visit from his sons – Michael and Simon.

Chapter 1 is a smooth introduction to customizing Sugar CRM. In Chapter 2, you will start to customize the SugarCRM application itself, and you will be able to add your own components in the form of module tabs and dashlets. In Chapter 3, you will learn how to modify the look and feel of SugarCRM. This chapter also shows how to add new fields to SugarCRM. Chapter 4 looks at the interfaces, and how to use them effectively in your customizations. Chapter 5 includes database schematic diagrams, showing the relationships between each table in the database and the other tables. Chapter 6 covers complete database schematics for the SugarCRM application, providing full details on each table. In Chapter 7, you will learn how to develop, test, and use SugarCRM in a safe environment using a development server, a test server, and a live server. In Chapter 8, you will learn to incorporate third-party modules into your site and develop your own modules from scratch. Chapter 9 deals with developing a custom workflow within SugarCRM. In Chapter 10, you will see various techniques for optimizing the performance of a SugarCRM implementation, and a few more ways of extending the application.