Hello
I worked a lot of weeks on vtiger.
I have 25 years of experience in software design.
When I see the code in vtiger I feel like a doctor who tries to heal a handicapped child.
But if a child has a genetic defect it is impossible to cure this because the defect is in every cell of the body.
The same applies to vtiger:
The code has been written by people who do not even have the most basic programming skills.
The code in vtiger is a misdesign from the very first days.
Meanwhile this creature grow so much that it has become impossible to make deep changes to fix these problems at the root.
Fixing the basic problems would mean to rewrite all.
In all the PHP files, which I worked on, I did not see even one part of code which has been written by a mediocre programmer.
All the code was written by bloody beginners without any experience of software architecture!
In my ZIP file of Service Pack 1 you find a much more detailed explanation about the lot of crap I found in vtiger and there you also find my "Competition of Shame": some examples of the ugliest code I found.
http://forums.vtiger.com/viewtopic.php?p=74721
I was so sick that I needed 10 days to implement a minor change which I would do in 2 hours if the code would be cleanly written.
After working several weeks on vtiger I was so sick - really sick - of this UGLY code written by Not-Programmers that I searched for alternatives.
I installed Sugar CRM and I looked into the source code.
Comparing Sugar and vtiger is like comparing day and blackest night.
The Sugar Team did really a good work in eliminating all the crap code (like for example if - else - statements of 1100 lines length), they redesigned the entire project at the root so that it has nearly nothing in common with the ugly vtiger.
I could convice my boss that with vtiger we are losing time and money.
Now I transferred all the data from vtiger to sugar and we are all happy that we did this step.
Even in the Community edition Sugar offers much more than vtiger.
- The graphicel reports are much nicer.
- The functionalty I added in my Service Pack mostly is already present in Sugar:
- It has LDAP already intergrated.
- The options I implemented in my Import Patch and in my Currency Patch are already implemented into Sugar.
- Picklists are REALLY international in Sugar.
You can have them display the same entry in different languages.
- What I like most is the Sudio where you can define which field appears at which position in the form.
- You can download many many additional modules for Sugar but even the basic functionalty offers more than vtiger.
- And: There are 3 good manuals for Sugar: for users, administrators, developers. In contrast the only one existing vtiger manual I could find did not help me much because it is very bad.
I recommend to ALL who read this:
Forget the dead born baby vtiger which has an incurable genetic defect and change to Sugar CRM which has a sane code written by real programmers.
In Sugar I changed a minor functionality and in contrast to vtiger I did NOT have to make the same change in 30 files. Sugar does not have the ugly Copy and Paste sickness of vtiger.
I easily implemented a new feature into Sugar which was impossible to implent in vtiger!
Once you installed Sugar you will be so happy and ask yourself why you wasted so much time with vtiger !
Dont waste one minute more of your time with vtiger!
Do the evolution!
This will be my last posting here.
Further bugfixes and postings of Elmü you will find in the sugar forum!
(Sugar also has bugs, but they are tiny compared with those in vtiger)
Elmü