Introduction

Overview

The Sugar Developer Guide is an essential resource for developers who are new to Sugar or to CRM and web-based applications. It describes how to configure and customize the Sugar platform for a broad range of tasks applicable to any organization that has a need to manage business relationships with people.

Prerequisites

Using and understanding the documentation contained in the Sugar Developer Guide requires basic programming and software development knowledge. Specifically, you should be familiar with the PHP general-purpose scripting language and the SQL programming language for accessing databases.

Understanding Sugar's Framework

Designed as the most modern web-based CRM platform available today, Sugar has quickly become the business application standard for companies around the world. The Sugar application framework has a sophisticated extension model built into it, allowing developers to make significant customizations to the application in an upgrade-safe and modular manner. It is easy to modify the core files in the distribution; you should always check for an upgrade-safe way to make changes. Educating developers on how to make upgrade-safe customizations is one of the key goals of this Developer Guide. For more information on Sugar's structure, please review the architecture section.

Supported Platforms

Originally, Sugar® was written on the LAMP stack (i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), but has since added support for every operating system on which the PHP programming language runs, for the Microsoft IIS web server, and for the Microsoft SQL Server, IBM® DB2®, and Oracle databases. For more information about supported software versions and recommended stacks, please refer to the main Supported Platforms page.

Sugar Products

Sugar has several CRM products available: Sugar Sell, Sugar Serve, Sugar Ultimate, Sugar Enterprise, and Sugar Professional, which are all sold under a commercial subscription agreement. These products are developed by the same development team using the same source tree with different modules and features available depending on the product. A comparison of each product's features is available in the License Types Matrix documentation of the Administration Guide.

Basic Development Rules for Sugar Products

Unless SugarCRM has given you express permission to do so, the following are what not to do when you are configuring, customizing or modifying this Sugar product:

• Do not remove or alter any SugarCRM or Sugar copyright, trademark or proprietary notices that appear in the Sugar products.
• Do not "fork" the Sugar software (e.g., take a copy of source code from this product and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software).
• Do not modify, remove or disable any portion of SugarCRM's "Critical Control Software."
• Do not combine or use the Sugar products with any code that is licensed under a prohibited license (e.g., AGPL, GPL v3, Creative Commons or another similar license that would "taint" the Sugar products and require you to share the source code for this product with a third party).
• Do not use any part of the Sugar products for the purpose of building a competitive product or service or copying its features or user interface.

Development Tools

Composer

When building applications, some developers prefer to use Composer to manage their external dependencies and make them more intuitive. For more information, please refer to the Composer documentation.