Install-fest: Meet the open-source CRM Zurmo!

So if you're bored with the regular coding dojos, here's a fun alternative. Ray and Jason of the Zurmo project are gonna give us a little overview and lead us in an install-fest. I'll supply the AWS instances for everyone to install into. Here's a little about Zurmo, straight from the horse's mouth:

Zurmo is an open source CRM application written in PHP utilizing jQuery, Yii Framework, and RedBeanPHP.

Our goal with Zurmo is to provide an easy-to-use, easy-to-customize CRM application that can be adapted to any business use case. We have taken special care to think through many different use cases and have designed a system that we believe provides a high degree of flexibility, covering a wide variety of use cases out of the box.

We don't have a million features. We can never beat out existing players in a feature war.

But considering companies wind up only using a handful of features, we don't think it really matters.

What we have so far is the beginning of a high-quality sales force automation tool. Stay tuned as we continue to make improvements.

From a technical perspective, we are very excited. We have decided to build Zurmo on three awesome development frameworks, Yii, RedBeanPHP, and jQuery. With almost a religious zeal for testing, you will find that our obsession with test driven development means a more stable application.

Gone are the days of 'upgrade and pray'. Now it is 'upgrade and test'.

We have installation walkthroughs based on different development platforms.

Windows Installation Instructions for Development using Apache (http://zurmo.org/wiki/windows-installation-instructions-for-development)

Linux Installation Instructions for Development (http://zurmo.org/wiki/linux-installation-instructions-for-development)

We're back at our favorite pizza place: Panino's Pizza on Orange Ave (http://g.co/maps/u9bwj). If you're looking for parking, on-street metered parking is free after 6pm, and there are a number of city garages nearby. I don't recommend parking at the Plaza, though.

Looking forward to another great meeting this month,

David @ OrlandoPHP.org