ChrisEly

Every website has a contact form but for the most part, that form just sends an email to the website contact with the information from that form.

SuiteCRM is different in that it creates a record in SuiteCRM and that records can be acted upon but Workflows.

SuiteCRM has 3 modules that can be used to receive information from webforms.  They are:

1. Leads
2. Contacts
3. Targets

We will go into more detail on these modules in a later lesson but for now we’ll create the webform for ‘Leads’.

SuiteCRM has a set of standard fields for all of these modules but you can add additional fields through the use of user-definable fields.

I always like to have a little bit of extra information in a webform to find out what type of interest my visitor has in visiting my website so I’m going to add a drop-down list to the webform; which will later be acted upon by a workflow.

First thing to do is head to ‘Admin’, note, you need admin rights to access the admin area of SuiteCRM.

From Admin, scroll down to the Developer Tools and select Dropdown Editor.

You’ll notice there are already a lot of dropdowns in use within the system so it’s worth taking a look at some of them to see what there.  Every dropdown can be used multiple times for user-defined fields.

We’re going to add a new drop-down called Inquiry Type:

I want to know from the visitor what their interest is so I’m giving them a choice of Maximizer CRM, SuiteCRM. WordPress or Other.  I am also adding a ‘blank’ response.  This is added by clicking on ‘Add’ with nothing in the ‘Item Name’.  Adding a blank field prevents another field from being the ‘default’ response.

Once we have created our new Dropdown list, we should head over to the ‘Studio’ to add this to the ‘Leads’ module.

From the Developer Tools, select Studio

Then from Studio, select Leads.

Click on Fields,

Then Add Field:

Select Data Type, Dropdown and from the dropdown list select the dropdown you just created.

Name your field (Note, field names cannot have spaces so use the underscore).  The Display Label can have spaces.  Let’s make this a required field, then…

Save the new field.

Now head back to Leads.  We have to make that field available to the record itself.

From Studio/Leads, Select Layouts. From there, select Edit View.

Now click the ‘Sync To Detail View’ check box.  That ensures that any changes we make in Edit Mode also update the Detail View; which is what you actually see in the record.

Editing records in SuiteCRM is a breeze.  Everything is ‘drag and drop’.

To add our dropdown field, we want to add an extra row to the record structure so grab the record object and drag it down to where you want to field to appear.

Once in place we can drag the newly created field to a slot in the new row.

Now click ‘Save & Deploy’

That field now appears in the Leads Module:

Now that we have all of the fields we want for our webform, we can create it.  Webforms are created from the Campaigns module so from the menu, select Campaigns.

We are going to create a campaign but not put any details into it for now.  We will be going into more depth on campaigns in a later lesson.  We just want the campaign name for the webform.

Click on Create Campaign, select type ‘Email’ and name the Campaign.  This will be used for the workflow in the next lesson.

Click Next to save the campaign then click on Create Person Form (Webform)

This presents us with a drag and drop screen that allows us to literally drag and drop the fields into the columns we wish to include into our webform.

Now we add the headings and details to the form:

Including the Form Header, Description, Redirect URL (where to direct the visitor once the form has been completed) and which Campaign we want to attach the webform to.  This is important for the Workflow and to identify the source of the record

This will take you to the editor where you can tweak the form and makes some last minute changes to how the form appears to your visitors:

When everything is as you want it, click Save Webform to generate the code for your website Contact page.

You can now embed this code into your website page.  If you’re using WordPress, click on the Text Tab, then paste the code into the page:

Publish the page and your new Webform will be active:

Completing the form and clicking submit will create the record in SuiteCRM

In my next lesson, we will create a Workflow to take action on this new record.

 

SuiteCRM is the world’s number 1 Open Source CRM system and Cronjobs/Workflows play a big part in why.

Workflows are automated processes that trigger on changes to something within the system.  They can be triggered by a change of field status in a record or by something like a new record being added.

Cron is a Linux utility which schedules a command or script on your server to run automatically at a specified time and date. A cron job is the scheduled task itself. Cron jobs can be very useful to automate repetitive tasks. … Scripts executed as a cron job are typically used to modify files or databases.

So SuiteCRM Workflows can be triggered by a field or status being updated but what if you want to make a change or say send an email to a client that has not ordered anything for a period of time.  This is where the scheduler and cron jobs come in handy.

A cron job can be scheduled to ping the system say every 2 minutes or just once per hour.  On busy sites, I tend to run them every 2 minutes.  I will cover cron jobs and scheduled Workflows in much more detail in a later lesson.  For now, lets setup the cron jobs.

Cron jobs can be setup in your hosting CPanel but I find it much easier and more manageable to setup cron jobs through the ‘Easycron’ service which handles the scheduling for a very small fee.  Believe me, it’s worth it.

For those of you who want to learn more about SuiteCRM scheduler and cron jobs, head over to the SuiteCRM website and look for ‘Scheduler Jobs in SuiteCRM in Linux – the Definitive Guide’

To setup cron jobs, you need to have access to an FTP client.  I use Filezilla.  You will need to make to small changes to the cron.php and config.php files in your SuiteCRM root directly.  These are of course, services I can offer you if you are not confident of doing them yourself.

To make changes to a php file you will need to use a text editor like Notepad or an HTML editor.  For simple changes like these, Notepad works just fine.

Just follow the simple steps below to configure cron jobs for your SuiteCRM.

Note:

Using the ‘All Files’ option in Notepad, first open cron.php and then change the following code from:

if (substr($sapi_type, 0, 3) != ‘cli’) {

    sugar_die(“cron.php is CLI only.”);

}

to :

function easycron_get_ip_address() {

    if (isset($_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_REAL_IP’]) && !empty($_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_REAL_IP’])) {

        return $_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_REAL_IP’];

    } else if (isset($_SERVER[‘HTTP_CLIENT_IP’]) && !empty($_SERVER[‘HTTP_CLIENT_IP’])) {

        return $_SERVER[‘HTTP_CLIENT_IP’];

    } else if (isset($_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR’]) && !empty($_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR’])) {

        return $_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR’];

    } else if (isset($_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’]) && !empty($_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’])) {

        return $_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’];

    } else {

        return ”;

    }

}

$easycron_ip = easycron_get_ip_address();

$easycron_ip_is_from_easycron = false;

if (!empty($easycron_ip)) {

    $easycron_bot_ips_in_json = file_get_contents(‘https://www.easycron.com/ips.json’);

    $easycron_bot_ips = json_decode($easycron_bot_ips_in_json, true);

    if (filter_var($easycron_ip, FILTER_VALIDATE_IP, FILTER_FLAG_IPV4)) {

                if (in_array($easycron_ip, $easycron_bot_ips[‘ipv4’])) {

            $easycron_ip_is_from_easycron = true;

                }

    } else if (filter_var($easycron_ip, FILTER_VALIDATE_IP, FILTER_FLAG_IPV6)) {

        if (in_array($easycron_ip, $easycron_bot_ips[‘ipv6’])) {

            $easycron_ip_is_from_easycron = true;

                }

    }

}

if (!$easycron_ip_is_from_easycron) {

    if (substr($sapi_type, 0, 3) != ‘cli’) {

        sugar_die(“cron.php is CLI only.”);

    }

}

Then save.

I always rename original files that I have edited so before reuploading, rename cron.php in your SuiteCRM folder to old_cron.php

Now upload the edited file.

The true significance of what you are doing now will become clear as you run through my lessons and as your experience with SuiteCRM grows.

Now let’s make the changes to the config.php file as per the instructions on the Easycron support page.

Access the Easycron support page (from here)

Run through the same process as you did with the cron.php code following the instructions in the Easycron guide.  You will be adding your FTP username to the config.php file.

Rename the old file in the SuiteCRM root and upload your edited file.

Now update your Easycron dashboard with your credentials:

Open your cron job dashboard, click on ” Cron Job” button and enter the relevant details for your installation.

In field “URL to call”, enter http://www.example.com/cron.php (set cron job to run every minute)

(replace www.example.com with your install location). Checkout below screenshot:

Your suiteCRM cron job should now be able to get triggered successfully from EasyCron.

 

 

 

 

When you start SuiteCRM for the first time you will need to setup your outgoing email.  The outgoing email is essential as it handles all of the automated messages as well as Workflow based emails, Email Responders and direct emails to your Contacts.

Head over to Admin, scroll down to Email Settings.

As you can see from my Outgoing Email setup screen, I have added my,

From Name: Christine Ely

From Address: chrisely@pacificcrm.com

I then entered the SMTP Mail Server credentials.  For my email I use Dreamhost but all hosting providers will provide instructions for the specific Mail Servers.

Ensure that you select ‘Enable SMTP over SSL or TLS?’.  For most users, SSL will be the preferred choice which automatically selects the default SMTP Port of 465.

Once you have entered your credentials, it is a good idea to send a test email to confirm everything is working.  You can see the result of that in the email receipt screen shot:

When you get that, you know that you have correctly setup your Outgoing Email.