MFPL/PTP CRM Review project Report

Installation

Ease of installation is not a criteria we are evaluating. However, in the interests of documentation, I'm going to record my experiences here.

Sugar CRM

I'm downloading the ​Community Edition (without the stack, since I already have PHP, MySQL, and Apache installed). I'm downloading version 5.0.0.f.

For starters, based on the ​documentation, I had to increase the amount of memory allocated to php to 40 M (on Debian systems the default is 16M). MFPL allows members to set their own memory limit. I'm not sure if other providers allow that or what limitations we should expect out in the wild.

I then unzipped the download into my web directory and pointed my browser to the web site. I got a nicely formatted install screen. After passing the requirements test, I chose typical install over custom install.

I filled in my database info and chose not to pre-populate the database with demo data. A few screens later, including one asking me to register with SugarCRM (which I skipped), I was ready to go.

All in all - a very easy installation.

vtiger

My first decision is whether I want the ​binary or source. Hm. I'm going with source because I'd rather not execute a binary that I know nothing about. The version I'm using is 5.0.4.

vtiger makes the sugarcrm requirement of 40M seem downright negligible. The biggy is a requirement of php5 - many commercial hosting provider are still running PHP4. In addition, vtiger ​wants:

Directives that are enabled by default in debian already - no change needed:

safe_mode = Off
display_errors = On
file_uploads = On
register_globals = Off
log_errors = Off
short_open_tag= On 

Directives that need to be changed:

max_execution_time = 600 (default on debian: 30)
memory_limit  = 64M  (default on debian: 16M)

Directives that need to be changed that I don't want to change

error_reporting=E_WARNING& ~E_NOTICE (default on debian: E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE)
output_buffering = On (default on debian: Off)

They want less errors to be reported. Keeping the debian default should be fine.

As for output buffering, the comments in the php.ini file says:

; Output buffering allows you to send header lines (including cookies) even
; after you send body content, at the price of slowing PHP's output layer a
; bit.  You can enable output buffering during runtime by calling the output
; buffering functions.  You can also enable output buffering for all files by
; setting this directive to On.  If you wish to limit the size of the buffer
; to a certain size - you can use a maximum number of bytes instead of 'On', as
; a value for this directive (e.g., output_buffering=4096).

I'm going to try to run vtiger with this turned off and see if it works anyway.