Our blog is moving(!) and other exciting community updates

We’re getting a head start on our New Year’s Resolutions!  We’ve given our developer community a fresh, new look, and we feel ten pounds lighter.  Let me give you a tour!

First, we’ve migrated our blog from developer.sugarcrm.com to the Developer Community at https://community.sugarcrm.com/community/developer/pages/dev-blog.  We’re really excited about this change as the community is now your one-stop-shop for everything related to developing on Sugar.  We’ll temporarily be putting new posts on both blogs, but please update your bookmarks now.

W-Systems shows off a Dashboard Drilldown Enhancement for Sugar 7

In a recent blog post by W-Systems, an Elite SugarCRM Partner, Christian Wettre showed off a cool enhancement to the Sugar 7 Saved Report Chart dashlet.  Very conveniently, they included a package you can download so you can easily install it and look at the code to see how it works without any fuss.  I just tried it in a Sugar 7.5.1 instance and it worked like a charm!

Since some of the most effective SugarCRM dashboard elements are charts based on reports, I find my dashboards full of those charts. These charts scream out for the ability to dig down into the underlying details. In the current release of SugarCRM 7 it is a little cumbersome to actually do this. We solved this with a code enhancement module that adds a drill down link to any Saved Report Chart dashlet. With this module installed you can click on the drill down link on any report based dashlet to open the dashlets underlying report in a new browser tab.

Head over to the W-Systems blog to see an instructional video and download this package for yourself!

A quick aside.  In production, SugarCRM recommends deploying new custom dashlets instead of overriding the built-in dashlets.  Users will be able find your custom dashlet just as easily as built-in dashlets while allowing the built-in dashlets to get upgraded.

Favorite Sugar 7 Developer resources

This would be a good post to bookmark!

Francesca, one of our Sugar Community members, has a great post on the Sugar Community where she lists some of her favorite Sugar 7 resources and asks the community to list their own.  It has become one of our most active conversation threads in the Sugar Community.

In the same spirit, I wanted to summarize the Sugar 7 resources that the community shared in that thread including a few of my own. Let me know if I’m missing anything below!

Ticomix presents SugarCRM Power Hour with Jeff Bickart

Below is a message from Ticomix, an Advanced SugarCRM Partner, about a monthly webinar series focused on the Sugar Developer/Admin hosted by one of our most active Sugar Developer community members Jeff Bickart.

SugarCRM Power Hour with Jeff Bickart

Webinar Series Overview:
We know how hard it can be to get the dedicated, interactive support you need, so we’re here to offer help. Each month, we’ll deliver a unique perspective to the common (and sometimes uncommon), everyday technical issues you face with the administration of SugarCRM. Each hour-long webinar will contain valuable information plus a live Q&A session to answer any burning questions you have. The initial schedule of topics is below.

The first webinar is happening March 11^th @ 1:00PM ET. In the webinar, Jeff will unveil helpful hints for setting up your development environment and installing Sugar. Even if you’ve already setup your Sugar environment, you’ll find valuable tips for optimizing your install of Sugar.

Also, Jeff welcomes questions prior to the webinar. Click here to access Jeff’s webinar question form »

Click here to register for one or all webinars »

UPCOMING POWER HOUR SCHEDULE (all webinars begin at 1:00PM US Eastern Time):

• March 11th: How to Set Up Your Development Environment & Install Sugar
• April 8th: Building Custom Dashlets
• May 13th: Using the SugarJobQueue & the SugarCRM Directory Structure
• June 10th: Workflows, LogicHooks & Deploying Packages
• July 8th: Layouts, Views and Building a Wizard

About Jeff:

Jeff Bickart, CRM Evangelist at Ticomix, has been developing in Sugar since 2004 (the same year SugarCRM was founded) and is one of the foremost experts in SugarCRM development. He writes a popular SugarCRM Developers Blog (SugarCRM: Developers’ Guide), is a frequent contributor on the Sugar community forums, and has made vast contributions towards Sugar’s code base. Jeff invites you to connect with him in several ways:

Twitter: @bickart
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bickart
Blog:  http://sugarcrm-dev.blogspot.com/