» 2007 » September Thomas Hambach

Wordpress theme: Cloudoon

September 28th, 2007

My first contribute to the Wordpress community is this theme called Cloudoon. This theme should work on Wordpress 2.2.1+ . It shouldn’t be too hard integrating any other plugin into this theme and it already supports the related posts plugin.

Unlike many other wordpress themes, this one is plug and play baby!

Preview the Cloudoon wordpress theme

Download Cloudoon.zip
Download Cloudoon.rar

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why vTiger is a great CRM

September 17th, 2007

Posted in php, vtiger

In my previous post I listed everything that sucks about vTiger. This time I’ll point what makes it a great CRM.

It’s fully opensource! You’ll be able to modify it as much as you want and there’s a bunch of plugins -made by the vTiger community- ready for download!
Outlook integration. I admit it’s not perfect but the source code of this plugin is available on sourceforge
Adding a field to a form is -almost- easy as 1 2 3! You can easily add custom fields thorugh the administration panel.
You don’t have to start writing a CRM from scratch. Everything you need is in there!
Very user-friendly interface

And that’s all I could find… I just had a quick look at the other Opensource CRM’ options there are and vTiger will be the best option out there if you want to be able to modify your CRM’s functionality and want all the basic functions already incorporated.

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why vTiger sucks

September 17th, 2007

Posted in php, vtiger

Inspired by Peter Goodman’s 12 Things You Should Dislike About PHP and15 Cool Things About PHP That Most People Overlook I’ve created a list of reason that make me dislike vTiger .

Total lack of coding documentation. External and in-line! vTiger is a very complicated system and finding out how a simple module works can be quite a challenge.
The coding standard comes close to “Just throw it in and pray noone will ever need to edit it”.
User privileges are stored in a file. Can anyone tell me why?
The main and sub tabs are defined in the database as well as in 2 files… and also the language files. which makes it tricky to add a tab.
Too many duplicate SQL queries.
Mixing of PHP & HTML. The vTiger team did their best separating PHP & HTML by using Smarty but they didn’t always feel like it. Examples given: The login page & the footer containing version information & copyright.
Something goes wrong and the system will still smile at you and tell you everything has worked a-OK. For example, you try to import invoices and it crashes somewhere because of an SQL error, it will still tell you everything has been imported. Same story when using the CRMentity class to insert data.
When I wrote my import invoices script, I checked the database for the correct date format… YYYY-MM-DD . It would be logical to pass the same date format to the CRMentity class? Right? WRONG! vTiger flips the date around and makes it DD-MM-YYYY . Resulting in having to provide the date in DD-MM-YYYY format so it’ll convert to YYYY-MM-DD. I’m guessing this is an old quick-and-dirty fix?
(not really a vTiger issue) Lack of (good) themes. I can only hope someone will start creating vTiger themes in the near future. Should you be looking for a nice theme, I’d recommend “Softed theme“.
All of the list views’ (eg: account list) data is fetched using AJAX. This results in not being able to use your back button, impossible to bookmark your current view and takes a long time to load.
Overall, it doesn’t perform when handling a lot of data. E.g.: It takes a hell-a long time to load the calendar if you’re an admin and everyone has synced their calendar.
vTiger has several quickfixes and most of them break other functionality, I quote: “modified by Richie as raju’s implementation broke the feature for addition of webmail to vtiger_crmentity.need to be more careful in future while integrating code“. Well Richie, thanks for fixing that but you broke something else!