March-June 2014: coreBOS 5.5

Well, mostly I was very nervous, expectant, waiting for the reactions of the community. I had been asked hundreds of times to leader this fork. We had just finished another vtiger Europe day where everyone who assisted spoke to me about forking vtiger crm. What I received, in general, was a cold shoulder and another total disappointment from my vtiger crm experience. Very few from the event followed. Not only was I ignored but many straight out told me I was wrong and stupid. That, obviously made me feel terrible. But there were also some who supported and applauded my initiative. I have to thank both groups. The first for giving me the courage and prowess to push forward and the second for giving me the reasons and support to convert coreBOS into a reality.

Development

coreBOS was conceived at the beginning of 2014. It was long overdue and should have been done sooner, but things come when they need to, I suppose.

We spent the first few months organizing the project and release a first official commit on March 25 starting from the existing code base of vtiger CRM 5.4.

From that date to the start of July 2014 most of the work are things that vtiger crm should have had for years, and would have had if vtiger company were actually an open source company:

• security fixes and patches that were already available in the community
• basic functionality that our team or others had already shared with vtiger crm but were totally ignored as is still happening now in 2017, like
• filling in email address when you send a PDF
• support for open office on the merge
• negative numbers on the inventory modules
• related list paging
• a lot of translation fixes
• custom fields on documents
• among many others

On the developer side

• we enhanced the webservice immensely with support for inventory modules, documents and emails and also a myriad of fixes and feature to make programming external programs easy, this was our main goal at this point.
• more import options to search on related fields
• restructure packaging to make it easier to maintain
• support for PHP5.4

• minor workflow enhancements

  We release coreBOS 5.5 on June 30th

You can find a full list of changes here.

All this necessary work conforms that background noise that is a constant in coreBOS even today and that you will see in all the posts.

There is an implacable movement of the code whereas we fix errors found, eliminate security issues and add features or simply cleanup the code to make it easier to work with and maintain, but while all that is happening there are big impact features that make it into the application, those long running projects that take time to roll out and which are added when they are ready.

In this first period I am covering, the big game changing feature was coreBOS Updater.

Due to the importance of this extension, (importance that I wasn't capable of seeing at that point in time), I will dedicate the next post to describing what coreBOS Updater is and how it does it's magic and, hopefully transmit how to keep your coreBOS install up to date.

See you soon