Building on SugarCRM

Chapter 2. Developing on the SugarCRM platform

As we saw back in Chapter 1, SugarCRM has lots to offer a developer. With a robust, modern MVC platform, convenient features, and a customizable and extensible framework, SugarCRM can be easily bent and twisted to solve whatever needs your organization has. This is what sets SugarCRM apart from its competitors in the CRM space, and what makes it such an ideal platform to build upon.

When most of us think of “developing an application,” we immediately want to jump into a text editor and start whipping up code. This is quite a barrier for most people, as for most business people, the language of PHP code is Greek to them, and bringing on a full staff of developers is not something they want to get themselves into for most simple tasks (there are more complex tasks in Chapters 4 and 5 where having a good PHP developer is helpful). So when the idea of “customizing an application to meet your needs” is brought up, you can imagine why most people shudder at the thought.

At SugarCRM, we’ve realized this, and so we’ve built several GUI-based developer tools right into the product that make doing much of the customization for a SugarCRM instance easy. In this chapter, we’ll look at some of those tools and how to navigate through them, and in Chapter 4 we’ll use them to build an application on the SugarCRM platform. We’ll begin our survey of these tools by looking at Studio.

Customizing the Out-of-the-Box Modules with Studio

Studio allows you to ...