The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications is the book I have been working on this year, which offers a unique insight into the SugarCRM platform from me as a engineer at Sugar. I go into details on the nuts and bolts of how things work: MVC, metadata, web services, and more, and then show how to extend the platform to meet any organizations needs. In the end, the book really shows the power of SugarCRM to fit into any business as a more than just a CRM, but more as a platform for application development. It’s also special because it’s the only SugarCRM book on the market that is an official book for SugarCRM, bearing the company logo on the cover.

The book is available on Amazon using the link above.

In the movie “A Field of Dreams” it was “if you build it, they will come”. Well for me, it’s been more of “if you write it, they will come”, as I’ve been invited to speak at two upcoming conferences.

• The 2009 DC PHP Conference, I’ll be presenting two talks: “PHP Optimization for Newcomers” and “Run Everything in your business on SugarCRM”. The first will give end users tips on getting started with PHP optimization, based upon lessons learned here at SugarCRM, and the second will be an overview of the Sugar developer platform.
• Ontario Linux Fest 2009, I’ll be presenting the “Build Your Business on SugarCRM” talk, which will be similar to the “Run Everything in your business on SugarCRM” talk from the DC PHP Conference, but this time with a bit more emphasis on the application itself and the built-in tools for application development.

Both are really cool opportunities for me as a presenter and for SugarCRM to better reach folks out in the trenches. Hopefully there are more to come down the road. Thanks to both shows for giving me the opportunity to be there!

I’m also down to reviewing the last remaining chapters in my upcoming book “The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications”. More on that in the near-term future….

Since I use a Mac for my primary development machine at work, I’ve been looking for a Subversion app with the power and ease of use of TortoiseSVN. I’ve tried a few different ones, and while they all work for the normal checkout, edit, commit workflow of subversion, I find myself going back to TortoiseSVN every now and then. A few cases for going back include viewing the history of a repository; looking for the full change history of a file, and easily browsing an entire repository. While many of the intergrated clients in Eclipse and other IDEs do this, I prefer a standalone client that doesn’t bind me to an IDE since I could be working with a number of different files in the course of a day. And I’m not really a fan of big IDEs anyways .

Enter Versions.

The most striking thing to me about Versions is it’s intuitiveness and simplicity. All the basic subversion workflow commands are at your fingertips; Checkout, Update, and Commit. A dedicated tab in the main screen shows the recent history of the repository, which is user configurable on how many commits/days you wish to show. There are even dedicated buttons for looking at local changes, history of a file, and running an svn blame to see who changed what line in the file. 

One level deeper we can find some nice advanced functionality. One such thing is reverting back to a particular revision, something every subversion user always has to think twice about on how to do at the command line. You can even edit the svn properties from the right sidebar, which displays information about the selected file. Side-by-side diffing of files is supported, but handled by external programs, such as FileMerge or TextWrangler. You can however intergrate any tool for diffing, check out the Versions Google Group for scripts people have submitted.

Versions is also nice since it keeps a check on your checkouts and repositories in real time. It constantly pools your checkouts for changes as well as the main repository. Displaying the number of files you have changed locally, as well as the number of files changed in the repository can be very handy so you know how far behind your checkout is and how many changes you have done locally. In the beta versions this was somewhat buggy, but now it is rock solid.

While Versions is a great tool, I’d love to see the a few things added, namely:

• When a file is in conflict, an option to accept all of the working copy changes and resolve or accept the last revision changes and resolve would be very handy, especially when doing merges.
• In the commit dialog, it would be great to have some word completion, like TortoiseSVN does. Things like filenames and class names in the committed files would be helpful, to reduce spelling errors and typing time.

Big props to the Versions development team on an excellent product!

The new PHP 5.2.6 release will feature automatic configuration of the NetServe Web Server thanks to help from James at Net-X Solutions. There also will be some bug fixes in the area of FastCGI configuration, Vista support, and extension configuration.

I’ve also changed jobs recently, starting at SugarCRM back in December as a Software Engineer. Big thanks to Travis Swicegood for helping me find this amazing opportunity.

Thanks to a missed CVS commit, Bug # 43230 came up b0rking the installer last week. I rebuilt it and updated it at http://www.php.net/downloads.php ( with big thanks to Derick Rethans for the karma and help finding my way to get it updated ).

Sorry for all the confusion and problems this has caused.

After reading Joe Stanger’s post on the Go Live release of the Microsoft FastCGI Extension, I’ve added support in the installer for the now in CVS. This should help those on deploying via IIS as it is much better option than CGI ( or ISAPI *shudder* ), and the installer will provide automatic configuration of IIS for you.

It’s almost been a year now since the first testing release the of the installer came out ( http://news.php.net/php.internals/24929 ). I would like to thank everyone who has used and provided feedback on it; as my first real contribution to PHP and Open Source in general, it has been a very rewarding experience.

I am always looking for any suggestions for improvements to the installer. I’m also curious how people are using it; is it just for personal development, or is there anyone using it to deploy to a group of desktops or servers?

I’ll be wandering around at OSCON in two weeks, mostly in the PHP tracks. If you are using the installer, I’d like to meet you and hear any feedback you may have.

No major user-visible changes were made for this release, but all the problems people had with configuring IIS and Apache should have gone away with this release. I’ve made some changes to the builder so that it supports an installer for PHP 6, which should appear on snaps.php.net soon.

Speaking of snaps.php.net , be sure to check out the re-design of the site. It’s much cleaner, uses the PHP styles, and lists the PHP Windows Installers snapshot builds. Thanks to Edin for plugging in the backend code and everyone on internals with comments and suggestions.

To correct a bunch of bugs found with configuring Apache and IIS, I’ve made an “unofficial” re-release of the installer for 5.2.2.

http://files.edin.dk/php/installer/php-5.2.2-2-win32-installer.msi

Thanks to everyone who reported the problems; hopefully this should address them.

Just wanted to say thanks to Edin for getting the installer building alongside the normal snapshot builds.

The big thing that got this done was going thru the Feature list and removing those Features without Components that where in the Extensions.wxs file. However, the XPath queries were spotty at best. The clean way of doing this by iterating thru all of the ComponentRefs in ExtensionFeatures.wxs and doing an XPath query on each one would often skip many results, so I had to do the less-than-elegant way and iterate thru the results of getElementsByTagName(“Component”) for each ComponentRef. At least it works now…

I’m also working on the making the installer work for PHP 6; it’s mostly a bunch of %s/php5/php6/g thru the files, so it should be out there relatively quickly.