Zoho Crm, how do they do that?

lajkonik86

Im quite amazed by the customizability of the zoho crm suite.
Does any of you have a clue how to make your php application so customizable and keep it maintainable?

NogDog

I am not familiar with that application, so do not know the specifics to which you refer. But in general, the main thing is to design customization into the application from the start rather than trying to "duct tape" it on after the fact. Lately I've gotten into using ini files along with the [man]parse_ini_file/man function to keep all customization parameters out of the actual script files.

lajkonik86

well they are a CRM application so lots of database work

many customers using their CRM

then they allow you to customise your own fields in your customer list

how they do this with the database?

nemonoman

Something like:
CREATE TABLE usertable (
userid INT NOT NULL ,
tableid INT NOT NULL ,
userLabel_1 VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL ,
userValue_1 VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL ,
userLabel_2 VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL ,
userValue_2 VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL ,

etc.

lajkonik86

i thought something like that would be an option.

but then they would have to create a different table for each module for each user.
would that still scale?
can you have mysql running several thousands of tables?
just asking because for me there is usually no more than 20 of them

nemonoman

You need to sort study up on database design.

They probably have a USER table, each user record includes all the labels that the user has designated.

CREATE TABLE userlabel (
userid INT NOT NULL ,
welcomeMessage VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL ,
menuLabel1 VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL ,
formLabel1 VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL ,

etc

One record per user.

Each datatable includes a userid as a key

SELECT * from propspect_table WHERE userid='12345'

etc