Thomas Hambach - Web engineer

I just read a post concerning time management and I must say my boss wouldn’t be too happy with most of these suggestions…

1. Don’t check your e-mail first thing in the morning.
From now on, I’ll ignore every top-priority e-mail that has been sent to me and read them before I go home. Then I can forget all about it while I walk to the bus stop and wait in the blistering cold for a bus that’ll come an hour late.

2. Commute by taking mass transit or carpooling.
Yeah, with all those friendly people on an overcrowded bus and winter coming up, I really look forward to getting up in the morning.

4. Don’t respond to e-mails as they arrive

What are you saying? Your house is on fire? Well, that’ll just have to wait, I’m really busy cleaning our brand new firetruck!

5. Don’t personal e-mail at work.
One of the few points I agree on…

7. Don’t read papers, e-mail newsletters or distributions lists.
I have better things to do than listen to what people are saying around me. I have work to do? Quickly scanning through an e-mail will surely save me more time than getting into a discussion with one of my co-workers.

9. Leave meetings when they are over due.
Screw you boss I’m going home, over due meetings is where I draw the line.

10. Ignore the phone
Oh yeah they called. Someone’s house was on fire? Yeah could be, but it seemed like a waste of time to pick up the phone… I did clean that new fire truck again.

Either way, Ravi made a good attempt at listing things that are a waste of time but it’s just not that simple as we all wish it would be.

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

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

1. 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!
2. Outlook integration. I admit it’s not perfect but the source code of this plugin is available on sourceforge
3. Adding a field to a form is -almost- easy as 1 2 3! You can easily add custom fields thorugh the administration panel.
4. You don’t have to start writing a CRM from scratch. Everything you need is in there!
5. 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.

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 .

1. 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.
2. The coding standard comes close to “Just throw it in and pray noone will ever need to edit it”.
3. User privileges are stored in a file. Can anyone tell me why?
4. 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.
5. Too many duplicate SQL queries.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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?
9. (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“.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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!