Open Source CRM - Options?

At 10:18a -0400 on Tue, 27 May 2008, Mark Neely wrote:

The brief requires a site that has sophisticated profiling capability,
particularly with respect to the ability to 'personalise' the site;
that is, recognise certain user preferences, and (where possible)
target content to individual user interests etc.

I am looking for examples of open-source CRM (or similar platforms)
used for this kind of profiling/personalisation, and would appreciate
any pointers readers of this newsgroup might be able to offer.

It's not directly a CRM, but the Django web framework may be of interest
to you. It's was developed at World Online (Lawrence, Kansas, USA), and
is exceedingly stable. http://www.djangoproject.com/

For the list: it's community is ostensibly DB agnostic, but the big wigs
seem to lean heavily towards Postgres.

Kevin

It's not directly a CRM, but the Django web framework may be of interest
to you. It's was developed at World Online (Lawrence, Kansas, USA), and
is exceedingly stable. http://www.djangoproject.com/

For the list: it's community is ostensibly DB agnostic, but the big wigs
seem to lean heavily towards Postgres.

And its python :)

Joshua D. Drake

At 12:58p -0400 on Tue, 27 May 2008, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

It's not directly a CRM, but the Django web framework may be of interest
to you. It's was developed at World Online (Lawrence, Kansas, USA), and
is exceedingly stable. http://www.djangoproject.com/

For the list: it's community is ostensibly DB agnostic, but the big wigs
seem to lean heavily towards Postgres.

And its python :)

That's actually a bigger plus than folks may realize because all three
communities (Django, Postgres, Python) share the
"do-it-the-right-way,-not-just-the-quickest/easiest-way" mentality. (At
least in my experience.) From an overall quality perspective, this is a
huge win for all involved. And if you're developing, you will
appreciate the chat rooms/mailing lists/community-in-general for all
three for just this reason.

Kevin

On 28/05/2008, Kevin Hunter <hunteke@earlham.edu> wrote:

And its python :)

That's actually a bigger plus than folks may realize because all three
communities (Django, Postgres, Python) share the
"do-it-the-right-way,-not-just-the-quickest/easiest-way" mentality. (At
least in my experience.) From an overall quality perspective, this is a
huge win for all involved. And if you're developing, you will
appreciate the chat rooms/mailing lists/community-in-general for all
three for just this reason.

How does Zope/Plone fit in there as an alternative in your opinion? :)

Kevin

Cheers,
Andrej

--
Please don't top post, and don't use HTML e-Mail :} Make your quotes concise.

http://www.american.edu/econ/notes/htmlmail.htm

On Wed, 2008-05-28 at 10:46 +1200, Andrej Ricnik-Bay wrote:

On 28/05/2008, Kevin Hunter <hunteke@earlham.edu> wrote:

And its python :)

That's actually a bigger plus than folks may realize because all three
communities (Django, Postgres, Python) share the
"do-it-the-right-way,-not-just-the-quickest/easiest-way" mentality. (At
least in my experience.) From an overall quality perspective, this is a
huge win for all involved. And if you're developing, you will
appreciate the chat rooms/mailing lists/community-in-general for all
three for just this reason.

How does Zope/Plone fit in there as an alternative in your opinion? :)

Do you really want the answer to that? :P

Joshua D. Drake

At 6:46p -0400 on Tue, 27 May 2008, Andrej Ricnik-Bay wrote:

How does Zope/Plone fit in there as an alternative in your opinion? :)

Heh, I can't honestly comment on Zope/Plone as I haven't used it from a
developer or admin standpoint. The OP asked for a suggestion of a CRM
or something similar and Django came to mind. Perhaps someone else can
offer an opinion/anecdote on Zope/Plone?

Josh perhaps, as his reply just came in. ;-)

Kevin

On 28/05/2008, Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> wrote:

How does Zope/Plone fit in there as an alternative in your opinion? :)

Do you really want the answer to that? :P

Of course! I know a few people who swear by it (and I've never had
to use it ...)

--
Please don't top post, and don't use HTML e-Mail :} Make your quotes concise.

http://www.american.edu/econ/notes/htmlmail.htm

I need to ask this question.

What do you mean whan you say "Don't top post???

I've seen this many times before and still don't understand.

Bob

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrej Ricnik-Bay" <andrej.groups@gmail.com>
To: "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com>
Cc: "Kevin Hunter" <hunteke@earlham.edu>; "Mark Neely"
<mark.neely@gmail.com>; "Postgres General List"
<pgsql-general@postgresql.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 4:08 PM
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Open Source CRM - Options?

What do you mean whan you say "Don't top post???

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style
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What do you mean whan you say "Don't top post???

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style

In-line comments are more readable, especially for longish emails. The PosgreSQL mail lists all prefer this method. Some related lists (the postGis list for instance) have a preponderance of top-quoting. It is always best to try to follow local style.

Greg Williamson
Senior DBA
DigitalGlobe

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(My corporate masters made me say this.)

What do you mean whan you say "Don't top post???

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style

On May 27, 2008, at 7:41 PM, Gregory Williamson wrote:

In-line comments are more readable, especially for longish emails.
The PosgreSQL mail lists all prefer this method. Some related lists
(the postGis list for instance) have a preponderance of top-quoting.
It is always best to try to follow local style.

But if you do bottom-post, please *do* edit the earlier content down
to just the context of your comments. Otherwise readers can end up
paging through lots of stuff before they get to the new bits. Archives
are available for reference if necessary.

(Oh, and sometimes it's a good idea to change the subject line,
too ... though I'm hardly innocent there ;-)

Cheers,

-- Andy

Andy Anderson <aanderson@amherst.edu> writes:

On May 27, 2008, at 7:41 PM, Gregory Williamson wrote:
In-line comments are more readable, especially for longish emails.

But if you do bottom-post, please *do* edit the earlier content down
to just the context of your comments. Otherwise readers can end up
paging through lots of stuff before they get to the new bits. Archives
are available for reference if necessary.

Indeed. Another little tip that some folk seem not to have figured out:
leave some white space between what you write and what you quote. The
posts that I hate even worse than top-posting are the ones where the
poster quotes the entire thread and inserts a line or two of comment
that isn't visibly separate from what's around it, like this:

blah blah blah
blah blah blah
blah blah blah
blah blah blah
blah blah blah
blah blah blah

comment added here

blah blah blah
blah blah blah
blah blah blah
blah blah blah
blah blah blah
blah blah blah
blah blah blah

This is a truly outstanding way of ensuring that no one will read
what you wrote.

Bottom line: have some respect for your readers. Make it easy to
distinguish what you wrote from the preceding material, and remember
that the only reason you are quoting anything at all is to provide some
context for what you are saying. We don't need to re-read the entire
darn thread.

regards, tom lane

On Wed, 2008-05-28 at 10:46 +1200, Andrej Ricnik-Bay wrote:

On 28/05/2008, Kevin Hunter <hunteke@earlham.edu> wrote:

And its python :)

That's actually a bigger plus than folks may realize because all three
communities (Django, Postgres, Python) share the
"do-it-the-right-way,-not-just-the-quickest/easiest-way" mentality. (At
least in my experience.) From an overall quality perspective, this is a
huge win for all involved. And if you're developing, you will
appreciate the chat rooms/mailing lists/community-in-general for all
three for just this reason.

How does Zope/Plone fit in there as an alternative in your opinion? :)

I will offer my experience on this one. We were attempting to use
Zope/Plone for the GNOME.Asia summit website. In short, it was a
disaster for us. Starting with no experience in Plone the learning curve
was very very high.

I was able to make some initial theme changes, but when we started to
add custom objects, new "page types" to display things like speaker
profiles, abstracts, and adding new data to registered user objects the
framework itself really got in the way. We spent some time with the
Plone community but there were no clear answers on what the errors we
were seeing actually meant, several times the answer was "Well, you
have something wrong, but it looks like it should be working....".

Setting up the development environment on each persons system was non
trivial as well because the "preferred" method of using Plone/Zope is
with a "buildout", which is basically a magical script which can
download and set up everything. It sounds easy enough, but in practice
it can turn ugly. They offer pre-established Plone/Zope tarballs,
but when we used them and we had some issues trying to use some of the
extra modules, the first answer was always "are you using a buildout,
because then it would be easy for you".

Judging by the questions that were being asked on the Plone mailing
lists / IRC channel there are some things that need to be changed in the
default Plone configuration. I saw "Why doesn't my Plone start" as
many times as I have seen "Why is select count(*) from
my_super_blog_awesomesauce; so SLOW!!!!!" on the Postgresql mailing
list. The different being there were 10 different "common" answers for
the not start question.

Using version control on the customization "product" you create can be
hard too, because even though you commit your code, and the other
developers check it out, some of the changes your product make to
Plone's layout and display cannot be reverted without essentially
deleting and starting the database from scratch again. Not optimal.

Oh, and to top it all off, it really wants to use ZODB for its
datastore. Using an external data back-end is supported, but things can
break unexpectedly.

I will say that Zope/Plone has had a lot of time spent on it and the
developers that know it very well can do some very interesting things
with it pretty quickly.

Django, much much easier learning curve. It just doesn't get in your
way. Nice support for sqlite, postgresql, mysql. Django's ORM is very
easy to understand. The template system syntax is very straightforward
with excellent separation from the backend code. The web designer on the
team knows no python at all and has been able to work on the templates
with no problems.

Time spent with Zope/Plone: 4 weeks Result: base plone installation has
a new theme. website 15% complete. Eta completion: Infinity

Time spent now with Django: 1 week 2 days. Result: Website 90%
complete. Eta completion: 3 days.

I have no desire for this to escalate into a Django vs Zope/Plone
debate, so please no one turn it into one! I am sure that if we had
known more Zope/Plone or had more time to learn and figure out how to do
things in the "Plone way" we could have had more success with it.

Sincerely,

Will LaShell

Will LaShell wrote:

Time spent with Zope/Plone: 4 weeks Result: base plone installation has
a new theme. website 15% complete. Eta completion: Infinity

Time spent now with Django: 1 week 2 days. Result: Website 90%
complete. Eta completion: 3 days.

I have no desire for this to escalate into a Django vs Zope/Plone
debate, so please no one turn it into one! I am sure that if we had
known more Zope/Plone or had more time to learn and figure out how to do
things in the "Plone way" we could have had more success with it.

I think it is important to realize that zope/plone really do serve
different ideals of purpose. That being said, Django rocks.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

Mark Neely wrote:

Hi,

I am working with a client (a media company) that is re-developing its
web publishing system.

I've already shortlisted potential CMS systems (including several open-
source options, such as Drupal and Joomla).

The brief requires a site that has sophisticated profiling capability,
particularly with respect to the ability to 'personalise' the site;
that is, recognise certain user preferences, and (where possible)
target content to individual user interests etc.

I am looking for examples of open-source CRM (or similar platforms)
used for this kind of profiling/personalisation, and would appreciate
any pointers readers of this newsgroup might be able to offer.

Hi,
And what about RT (Request Tracker - http://bestpractical.com/rt/)
.
AFAIK it is free and open-source, uses Postgres and is easy to setup.

Regards,
Kaloyan Iliev

kaloyan@digsys.bg (Kaloyan Iliev) writes:

And what about RT (Request Tracker - http://bestpractical.com/rt/)
.
AFAIK it is free and open-source, uses Postgres and is easy to setup.

RT has a very different purpose; it was designed to track work (e.g. -
"work tickets"), as opposed to managing web site content.

It *might* be used as a bug tracker, though with a considerably
different flavour from (say) Bugzilla; as a CRM, it would be pretty
unsuitable :-(.
--
output = reverse("moc.enworbbc" "@" "enworbbc")
http://cbbrowne.com/info/lisp.html
"Listen, strange women, lyin' in ponds, distributin' swords, is no
basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives
itself from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic
ceremony." -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail

What about SugarCRM?

David

On May 28, 2008, at 8:52 AM, David Wall wrote:

What about SugarCRM?

It's nice, but it's MySQL only, with a few desiccated corpses of ports
to PostgreSQL done by third parties littered in it's wake.

vTiger is a fork / knock-off of Sugar which has sorta-kinda support
for PostgreSQL in older versions, but not in the current version. http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/VTigerCRM

Cheers,
Steve

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 4:18 AM, Mark Neely <mark.neely@gmail.com> wrote:

I've already shortlisted potential CMS systems (including several open-
source options, such as Drupal and Joomla).

[snip...]

I am looking for examples of open-source CRM (or similar platforms)
used for this kind of profiling/personalisation, and would appreciate
any pointers readers of this newsgroup might be able to offer.

I think the important question is whether the op means CMS or CRM
(quite different).

--
regards,
Robin