Building on SugarCRM

Chapter 3. Building Your Application Using the Sugar GUI Developer Tools

Now is when the fun begins. With a healthy knowledge of the SugarCRM platform, and everything that the SugarCRM developer GUI tools can do, we are now going to dive right into building a sample application on the platform. This application will have many pieces to it, from visual layout to business logic to external services integration. We’ll break apart the building of the application over the next several chapters, starting in this chapter with building the core modules and visual layouts. We’ll build upon it in the next chapter with business logic and custom forms, and in the final chapter with integrating it out with external services.

So with no further ado, let’s dig in to what the application will be and how to design it.

Application Overview

For our exercise, we will be building an application to manage a conference. Conferences have concepts very similar to managing customers in terms of how they manage sponsors, but they also have different entities such as attendees and speakers to manage. There’s also some additional “glue” modules needed, such as one that can group sponsorships, attendees, and speakers for an entire single event itself. We’ll also want to track feedback from attendees, including session feedback, and keep that with the speaker to help decide the schedule for future events.

So overall, we are looking at three major sections to the application:

• Sponsor management that has all the details ...