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Chapter 1 SugarCRM Overview

Platform Overview

SugarCRM was originally written on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). Since version 1.0, the SugarCRM development team has added support for every operating system that the PHP programming language runs on (including Windows, Unix and Mac OSX), for the Microsoft IIS Web server and for the Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases. Designed as the most modern Web-based CRM platform available today, SugarCRM has quickly become the business application standard for companies around the world. See the Supported Platforms page for detailed information on supported software versions and recommended stacks.

SugarCRM is available in three editions: the Community Edition, which is freely available for download under the GPLv3 public license, and the Professional and Enterprise Editions, which are sold under a commercial subscription agreement. All three editions are developed by the same development team using the same source tree with extra modules available in the Professional and Enterprise Editions. Sugar customers using the Professional and Enterprise Editions also have access to Sugar Support, Training and Professional Services offerings. Contributions are happily accepted from the Sugar Community, but not all contributions are included as SugarCRM maintains high standards for code quality.

From the very beginning of the SugarCRM Open Source project in 2004, the SugarCRM development team designed the application source code to be examined and modified by developers. The SugarCRM application framework has a very sophisticated extension model built into it allowing developers to make significant customizations to the application in an upgrade-safe and modular manner. While it may be easy to modify one of the core files in the distribution, you should always check to see first if there is an upgrade-safe way to make your changes. Educating developers on how to make upgrade-safe customizations is one of the key goals of this Developer Guide.