Comments on: why vTiger sucks

By: Edwin

Edwin — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:07:49 +0000

Thanks for point out these issues, but one thing bugs me. Is commercially written software any better? I was involved in a blue chip bespoke system a few years ago and horrified that the conultants (on £600 a day) were following no naming conventions and not commenting their code at all. They weren’t even giving functions and variables intuitive names. Their excuse? They were under severe pressure to deliver quickly because of previous problems on the programme. The prgramme was finally delivered, it was flaky and cost three times it’s originally budget of £20m. Eventually yet another team of experts arrived and declared that the whole system had not been built properly (by their consultants) and we would have to pay them to rebuild the system. Welcome to the wonderful world of professional programming.

By: Manu

Manu — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:27:06 +0000

Hi Thomas!

In Puerto Rico we have a saying that goes “a caballo regalado no se le mira el diente” which basicaly means “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”.

Vtiger, and many other ready-made open-source web systems are powered by the community. You’re not paying for them, so don’t expect a “good service”. So, be bold, download, tweak and code, study if you have to, but don’t criticize. Thanks.

By: marius

marius — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 12:27:53 +0000

I feel the vtiger team is deliberately making it extremely difficult and unpleasant to develop on vtiger (the code is barbaric to say the least). I can only assume that they make money by selling it to local clients and care little for the rest of the world. A quick search of the forums shows the same issues from 2005 cropping up in the latest version and (from my pod) they probably have the most number of unanswered questions of any open source project by far.

No documentation = no developer implication
bad coding = your better off paying for a commercial version than paying a programmer to fix it

good luck with that

By: David Esrati

David Esrati — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 02:25:29 +0000

I’ve been trying to work with the vTigerCRM team for about a year- with UX/UI improvements. They seem receptive- but, they aren’t going to be able to implement anything major till this time next year (2012).
The simplest thing a crm should do is display the history of “contacts” or “touches” with a client- be they phone calls, emails, quotes- etc.
The current version of vTiger can’t- they are suggesting it may happen by 5.4 due in a few months.
The reality is- it’s a long way from what it needs to be.
In the mean time Sugar 6 is out- and has many of the features that I’ve been discussing with the vTiger people- with a much cleaner interface.
I’m ready to chuck vTiger at this point.
As to other opensource CRM systems- right now- it’s called fat free crm- it’s a rails app, which unfortunately runs on rails 3.0 which cpanel doesn’t support.
Looks promising- if you know Rails- and if you like HighriseCRM from 37 signals.
We’ve looked at a ton of CRM offerings- both closed and open source- and found almost everyone of them overly complex- and not very user friendly.
We did find a gem of a project management tool: http://www.teambox.com which is open source (although they hide that on the site) and it works beautifully.
It’s also a Ruby on Rails solution.
Rumor has it that the next version may include some CRM functionality- since large projects require some CRM functionality. Look into it.
In the mean time, I’d be interested to hear what the people on this forum think of the new version of Sugar- and if anyone knows a way to port data from vTiger 5.2.x to Sugar 6?

By: Jack

Jack — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:07:58 +0000

@Yup. CiviCRM sounds good. As a developer coming from Drupal background (orderly environment), CiviCRM sounds inviting – only that I dont like the non-profit notion of it. I have a bit used Vtiger, and I must admit there are no good standards as MVC is not clearly implemented. I would like to see an Enterprise targeted DrupalCRM.
Vtiger works well, till u start customizing anything and the first baseline for customizations start with theme. While its easy to copy existing theme rename it and change the css styles to override, its not easy to track the templates where the elements are defined leave alone finding the elements of the home page(before login). Clients like to see visual changes before functionality comes in.
Vtiger is poor in documentation – it reminds me of XOOPS, a CMS I used to use before going to Drupal. GOOD IN PERFORMANCE BUT POOR IN CUSTOMIZING. I have come to realise that proper documentation lacks in all opensource projects which are not based on good patterns because its just another hell of #$*&&* to document from unorderly crap.
Nevertheless, kudos Vtiger team – it works BUT I DONT KNOW WHY I FEEL LIKE YOU DELIBERATELY make sure that the project is not easily customizable despite the contributions sent by the community.
Vtiger = XOOPS
CiviCRM = DRUPAL
DruCRM (Enterprise) = WHAT AM WAITING FOR

By: Yup

Yup — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:45:15 +0000

Dear Thomas ,
for any future use please check out civiCRM.

OO design, quality code by a quick code review, highly customizable, integrated to either Joomla or Drupal (means you can get add-ons).

It is made for non-commercial organizations, but like stated early, it is customizable.

If you a developer dealing with vTiger and SugarCRM – well, good luck.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 10:11:19 +0000

Here is the truth about vTiger. (1) It’s an absolutely great project and the best CRM solution out there. (2) Make sure you use a WEB-SCRIPT-FRIENDLY webhosting! You can break your balls several times trying to install it on a crappy webhosting with crappy settings. (3) Customize vTiger, for God’s sake! It’s not so difficult, unless you are retarded.

Most complainers are trying to install it on a cheap or old server, it doesn’t work, they spend hours and days trying to change settings, checking forums, posting questions, etc. If they manage to install it, then they are just f***ing lazy to customize it for their needs.

I’ve installed and customized it for a number of companies and everyone’s happy. Geez, people, you sound like those who make posts why MS Windows is bad!

By: ciccio666

ciccio666 — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 06:38:18 +0000

I love vTiger!!! As my clients do. In my case I have no problem with coding in vt and no problem of performance on the application and database.

Many Thanks to the vTiger Team!!!
Cheers Guys.

By: Vtiger Sufferer

Vtiger Sufferer — Thu, 19 May 2011 08:12:24 +0000

Jason, can you please be more specific on dropping the tables.

By: Jason Judge

Jason Judge — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 17:54:21 +0000

OMFG – over 430 tables. That is just insane. There are logical data structures, and there are physical database table structures, and they really do not have to map 1:1

With a one-line change to the adodb MySQL driver, all the *_seq tables can be dropped immediately. They are simply not needed, and only implemented for compatibility with databases that did not support either sequences or auto-increment datatypes, of where there really are none any more.