Project of the Month - July 2009

Enhanced Studio

Description of project

The CODE field type can be used to add Buttons, AJAX updating fields, values calculated from others, embedded elements with values which can be stored to the DB. Recently added: Calendar Module Template with Aggregate Measures and DateTimeCombo Type with Time operations support.

Trove Info

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

I strongly believe in the SugarCRM product and in the ability of its developers and its community. So I am very happy to see that my efforts are paying off by receiving this award and by the positive feedbacks I have collected online and at the last SugarCon. The main benefit is that my skill in the product has become more and more complete thanks to the interaction with the community. This encourages me to make SugarCRM my professional choice.

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

The other popular project of mine is Enhanced Search, which is a plugin that adds new functionalities to SugarCRM Advanced Search. The two plugins are often used in conjunction to customize SugarCRM without modifying the php code. This is the idea: to provide tools that standardize the customizations of SugarCRM.

Well, the very first version of Enhanced Studio was very simple. It was the answer to the following question: "What is the easiest way to do the widest range possible of customizations (without modifying the SugarCRM source code)?"

I think the answer is a field containing some php code that is evaled each time it is accessed to. This is essentially what the first version of Enhanced Studio did.

Of course now Enhanced Studio has become much more complete, and includes, among the others, the option to create the code field also in the Sugar Database, the Calendar template and an advanced php editor tool.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

The final aim of Enhanced Studio is to help the Administrators to customize SugarCRM with no limitations but the requirements of the final user.

Another target is to make it easier: the Enhanced Studio developer community is growing fast, so even a non-programmer can customize Sugar by using the Samples they can find online or in the Administration Manual, a complete guide to the Enhanced Studio usage whose last version can be downloaded from the SugarForge project's page.

Last but not least: the portability. All the customizations made through Enhanced Studio can be exported/imported to/from different SugarCRM installations running Enhanced Studio itself.

Is there anything that the users should know about? Something hidden/new in this project? Think of this as an opportunity to describe how it works to a user.

Well, the easiest thing a user can do (the "Hello World !") is to download the Enhanced Studio demo version from the SugarForge page, to install it and to add a field to the Contacts module: through the Studio tool he can create a field of the new type "Code" with a simple php code that echoes a string "Hello World!".

Then he can add the field to any of the SugarCRM Views and he has done: the "Hello World!" writing appears. Another easy step is to create a custom module using the new template "Calendar", provided from the 3.0 release.

To do so, the Administrator only has to select the template "Calendar" while creating a new module, and so he will be able to navigate the new module the same way he does with the SugarCRM Default Calendar Module.

These simple first steps only help to understand how this tool is powerful and easy to use: the reference for the advanced customizations (Image fields, AJAX applications, interaction to DB, and whatever is possible to do to a web application) is the practical guide and the samples of the Administration Manual .

As far as I can remember, Enhanced Studio has been used to :

• Develop Image fields
• Develop Upload fields
• Populate selection fields with custom values (retrieved from the Database or related to the choices of other fields)
• Connect to Google Map to show the location of the Contacts' addresses
• Interact with SugarCRM or external Databases to store and retrieve data
• Calculate field values from others
• Automatically send emails by pressing a button
• Perform any action by pressing a button through AJAX, such as connecting to an external application
• Develop timetable modules with the aid of the time calculation library
• Develop modules with the Day/Week/Month/Year measure aggregates

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

First of all I wish to thank the Enhanced Studio community, a group of cool developers who put their Enhanced Studio customizations online and share with the others.

I am planning to provide online tools to help them to develop and share their works more efficiently and seamlessly.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

I have many ideas to improve SugarCRM usability and customizability so I suggest the users to keep in touch with the SugarCRM Enhanced World.