Chapter 4. Diving Deeper with Custom Code
So if you’ve got to this point, you’ve built out the core of the conference management application. And this core does quite a few things, allowing us to track and manage all of the sponsors, speakers, and attendees for a specific event as well as across various events. If you were developing this core from scratch, it may take you a month or more to get to this point, but with the ease of working with the various SugarCRM GUI developer tools such as Studio and Module Builder, we could pull this off in a few hours and be ready for the stakeholders to start playing with the newly built application right away. This fact alone makes building such an application on the SugarCRM platform a no-brainier, and alleviates all sorts of extra work for you as a developer.
Even with all of that built, there’s still more that can be done to better streamline the workflow of the application. It would be great to not only bring information about the data in the system and its changing state, but also to automate common and tedious tasks within the system to make it easier to use. Luckily, SugarCRM has a rich and powerful API for building these sorts of customizations with ease, and in this chapter we’ll look at how to do a few of these through easy-to-build custom PHP code.
Bring the New Happenings with the Conference into the Activity Stream
The Activity Stream was a feature added back in Sugar 5.2 that brought social networking inside of your organization, ...