I have been playing around with SugarCRM for the past week or two, trying to write some easy custom additions. I am bitter for the fact that it has taken me two weeks to figure out how to accomplish what I need. It seems like there is a bit of a lack of hand-holding for custom code (that works with the current version) and the people who know how to do it, want to charge you a shit load of money to get it done.
I figured out the database relationships between tables fairly easily and wrote my query to count the number of leads assigned to user accounts between specific dates, those dates being pulled from the advanced search in the Lead area. That took me no time at all, but trying to figure out how to put it into the output of the left, shortcut bar, well that stupidly took me hours of time, and some money to get it done, may I add a week late. I posted the job on oDesk to get some quick help so I could be done with it, and I had some a-holes from India wanting to charge me $600 for 30 hours of work to get it done, with my query and logic included. Apparently they think I am a fucking idiot. I know for a fact, a guy who works with SugarCRM even occasionally could get it done in less than an hour.
So I ended up agreeing to pay someone $100 to get it done in a rush (the same day). Let’s just say, it took a fucking week, because obviously they just do not care. When I finally got the code, for testing purposes, and found out they edited maybe 10 lines total in a theme file to get it done, it only reinforced my statement above. I do not mind paying a bit of money to learn something for future work, but the fact it took them a week with no communication to create 10 lines of code, not happy. On top of that they did not use my query, which was far superior to theirs, so I had to go back in integrate it. I am going to guess it was a major language barrier…
Well anyway that is all over with, I got it working and that’s that. On other news I learned quite a bit about the SOAP API in the past couple of days. It is very powerful, and once you learn how to use it correctly, it can make interfacing with SugarCRM quick and not so dirty. You just have to really study examples and whatnot to get it right.
Ryan Jauregui