What's the status of RedHen CRM?

Hi Lucus,

Sorry for the delay. I've been out of town. Thanks for your understanding about how open source projects like this progress too. The reality is that things are moving more slowly than we would like, but we're still very committed to the project. If you are going to need to choose a production-worthy CRM in the next month or so though, I'd pry stick with CiviCRM or Salesforce.

-sean

immensely excited for a real drupal crm with sales/marketing stuff in it

i agree,

we too need to choose a CRM very soon, and this project has excite us. :-)

Ok, so just to know how we can jump in to help here.

You've got a bunch of modules in git already. Does this get you something better than a WSOD?

Are you looking for more contributors?

Very excited as well as this CRM could integrate with Drupal Commerce and fulfill client automatisation.
Grtz.

Hi Folks,

First off, thanks for the continued interest in CRM in D7! I'm assuming that all of you are involved in the more general CRM discussion for D7 here: http://groups.drupal.org/crm-api. (If not, you should follow it!)

So, here's the scope: The summer has turned out to be more slammed with projects than we'd hoped. So, not as much work has been happening with RedHen as we'd hoped. Progress is being made, but on more diverse fronts. Shomeya's been doing a lot of work with Addressfield. ThinkShout has developed an event registration system similar to D6's sign-up module but leveraging Fields. ThinkShout has also just released an alpha of its MailChimp STS module (http://drupal.org/project/mailchimp) which is a great step towards the creation of a robust bulk email tool (with click-through and delivery tracking) w/in Drupal.

The pieces are coming into place. But our work has been a bit scattered.

We still feel really strongly about this work. The project is far from dead. But we don't have a timeline for the project at the moment. There is a chance that we'll get a client project this summer that will pull all the development in tighter. I'll keep you posted.

Cheers,
Sean

Sub

Hmm, not sure how I missed this! There is already a project dedicated to making a full blown CRM happen in Drupal! As mentioned above there is a lot of work on http://groups.drupal.org/crm-api.

This project seems like a duplicate effort, so I think it would be beneficial for everybody to work together on a single CRM rather than separately. There is currently a call for participants for a code sprint at DrupalCon, at http://tiger-fish.com/blog/drupal-help-bring-drupal-crm-life-drupalcon-l...

What do you guys think to this? Did you already know there was a project to create a Drupal CRM before starting this?

Hi Chris,

Thanks for reaching out - and more importantly for helping push the community's collective work around a native CRM in Drupal forward.

Yes, we are aware of the CRM API work. (See: http://groups.drupal.org/node/134789). When we started RedHen, we hadn't seen much progress in the CRM API group. I believe the issue was that that group was waiting to see how a few things panned out with Drupal Commerce. Since then, we've had some other projects kick up that have slowed down our own progress on RedHen. Indirectly we've developed a lot of code around event sign-ups and bulk email that could support RedHen (or any other CRM implementation), but we need some additional time to get this work out the door as a contribution.

In short, we need to make some decisions in the next few weeks internally about how we can best help move CRM forward. You're right that it doesn't make sense to duplicate effort. There are some really, really smart minds in the CRM API conversation. And it's very possible that we need to fold our effort into the CRM API work. At the same time, as we've seen with Drupal Core development (and more importantly, Drupal Core architecture debates and issue queue management), it's sometimes hard to develop big feature sets "by committee". If we look at Ubercart, for example, we see that some of the large contributions to Drupal are often lead by one or two shops. Also, if you look at the work done in the Drupal mapping space, there's also sometimes a benefit to work being done in parallel tracks.

I think that this conversation needs to continue. I think that we'll have a better answer for you soon. Is that a fair answer? Perhaps we could chat a bit more either on this ticket or on a Skype call? Again, it's really great to connect with you.

Thanks!
Sean

Subscribe

Sean,

There is no code for the Drupal CRM project but this will be rectified by the end of DrupalCon. The basic architecture is found at http://groups.drupal.org/node/89779 although this is a guideline and I'm sure this will evolve.

In general, the discussion has been at http://groups.drupal.org/crm-api as mentioned above. However, the Drupal 'web-o-sphere' is woeful at providing places for discussion, and g.d.o itself is a confusing mess and not at all appealing to use.

My hope is that once the first code is laid down (it doesn't matter if this code is completely rewritten later, or if we have 5 versions of code doing the same thing initially), we will commit this to the CRM project and use the issue queue for discussion.

I do however feel the need to create a 'manifesto' or something similar to outline the goals for the project, such as defining a particular meaning of the term 'CRM' (since it's different things to everyone) and an overall scope for the project. This can come later though, once more momentum has been built up.

Chris, That sounds great. Can't wait to see what comes out of London!

Hi - please is there any update on this?

Just thought I'd post a link here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/179339#comment-595384

I was kind of replying to the discussion here and on the group in one.

I think that the following post provides a pretty solid update on our work towards features for RedHen: http://groups.drupal.org/node/179339.

Updating this ticket to let folks know that we're in active development. We're currently developing RedHen for 3 clients - and as such we're using an internal Chili project for ticketing. We are mirroring code to D.O. however. The code that's up there now is actually pretty darn stable. It's very far from complete - but you can create contacts and organizations, create connections between them, do some basic filtering, etc.

Further updates. RedHen is in Alpha2 at the moment, with a Beta release scheduled to be released at Capital Camp in DC at the end of July, 2012.