Is CRM still being maintained?

subscribing

subscribing

Subscribing

Subscribing

vaguely...
I spoke to Allie about it at DrupalCon, and she said yes, but much in need of attention.

subs

Subscribe.

We've been getting the ball rolling on a project called Drupal CRM which aims to be the de facto CRM solution for Drupal.

We'd love to acquire this namespace if possible.

Seconded.

We'd like the existing maintainers on board too if they are still interested.

I have marked the project as abandoned.

Is there an alternative CRM/Ticketing module for Drupal which is still being maintained?

I could really use one now but confused as to what is still available, and I don't want to make the wrong choice!

Thanks for any help

I don't see that this is fixed. Still no word from the original maintainer. I nominate giving the project to psynaptic.

The ownership of the module has been passed to psynaptic.

Thanks ;)

Excuse me?

How is it possible to remove maintainership without ever contacting the project's owner?! There was code, and there are plans for more. Despite anyone's personal opinion on the rate of a project's development, a decision like this needs to involve all parties affected by it!

Were you subscribed to your project's issue queue? This issue sat in the queue for quite a long time.

Regardless of her being subscribed, a direct mail should be sent in such cases.

I thought I was, but it seems that I don't always get subscribed to my own projects by default, and it's possible that I never set that straight. My contact form works, however, and I'm always on IRC.

It seems totally insane to me that a project can be reassigned while the developer is still actively participating in Drupal, without any attempt to contact her about the matter.

I recall joachim asking me about this at some point, and I said I still had plans and even code so I was still intending to use the namespace. He made mention of this here, but the maintainership change got rammed through anyway while *nobody asked*.

An initiative of this scope is a large undertaking, and any "CRM" solution that contains a lot of code in itself is a mistake. We've been actively developing the underlying/associated functionality (e.g. Send, Pay, MLM, etc.), and are now in the process of putting together a funding proposal to tie it all together. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that this happened!

It's also worth mentioning that whether or not I received any project updates for CRM, this issue was moved to the Webmaster queue prior to any Maintainership discussions. Thus, I would never have received any of the updates discussing ownership.

On March 31st, the issue was removed from the CRM queue and moved to the webmaster queue where the maintainership discussion occurred. On April 1st, the project was marked as abandoned. Was this a joke?

An official inquiry of maintainership was asked on Feb 17. Unclear if a courtesy e-mail was made to the maintainer. On March 30 it was transferred to the webmasters queue to finish the process since there was no reply. That was over a month of waiting.

It's all pretty clear in http://drupal.org/node/251466:

1. Review the issue queue and commit messages carefully to be reasonably sure the project is abandoned to avoid annoying a maintainer who may simply be busy.
2. File an issue in that project's queue under the "support request" category politely asking if it is still maintained. For the title, use something like Is PROJECT_NAME still being maintained?. By putting the project name in the title, you can catch the attention of people reading via the global tracker.
3. Wait two weeks to give the maintainer time to respond.
4. If there is no response, move the issue to the webmasters queue.

I thought I was, but it seems that I don't always get subscribed to my own projects by default, and it's possible that I never set that straight.

Yet another case where #872774: Automatically subscribe users to issues in their project on node creation would help. Any feedback on that?

I'm sorry, but that's beyond discourteous and it's downright self-serving. It creates bad blood in the community to foster "collaboration" this way.

@Dave: I think these instructions should be amended to make sending a mail through the contact form a requirement. Can be short and point to the created issue. I somehow had assumed this would happen...

@Gerhard: One would assume that would be the case. This doesn't seem like a reasonable effort, compounded by the issue greggles and Allie cited with maintainers not automatically being subscribed to their projects.

As a maintainer of quite a lot of projects, I make it my business to visit http://drupal.org/project/user on a fairly regular basis.

Allie -- it really looked like you weren't watching this any more at all. Anyway, as I said way further up, it would be great to work with you on this, as you've been in the CRM space for ages. Are you going to be at CPH -- we're planning a BoF there.

PS. And yes, I don't see much code being in the actual CRM thing. It's profile2 and other bits and pieces and that D7 proof of concept address module which I can't find offhand.

So, what do we want to have happen here?

As this is originally Allie's space, and the project was pulled from her without her being notified, it should go back to her control.

At that point, it's her call what she wants to do, but this project should revert to her as the maintainer.

I apologize for the troubles.
I normally send an email to the current maintainer (which didn't happen in this case, as Allie Micka reports she didn't receive any email about this report).

I agree with killes; in my understanding, what reported in Dealing with abandoned projects is what users who want to take over a module, became co-maintainer, or report an abandoned project need to do; only in the case the user is not able (or doesn't want to) take over a project (which is marked as abandoned), the page reports what a site maintainer should do (even though the list is not complete).
In all the cases, I send an email to the current maintainer, and wait two weeks to give time to the user to reply; normally, I also report in the email what could happen if there are no replies in two weeks, and I report the link to the opened issue, saying to reply there.

Thank you, kiamlaluno, for your response.

I feel that there are two things happening independently here: a certain process was followed, and that process is not necessarily "fair" because it doesn't involve all of the affected parties.

This means that the process should be amended to prevent a similar situation in the future.

However, while I obviously *want* the ownership to revert without any further discussion and it just seems like to right thing to do, it's just as unfair without involving affected parties. I mean, unfair or not - if the correct process was followed, this can't be fixed by making up a new process and retroactively applying it. This is why I'm upset - I can see it from both sides and it makes me feel like there's no clear solution.

psynaptic is on this thread, but we haven't heard from him. It is my hope that collegial fairness and good judgment can get this particular issue resolved, and we can move on to a more transparent process going forward.

Hi Allie,

I'm sorry that you are upset and that you feel this has turned out in a negative way for you. We all thought that you had abandoned the "crm" namespace. There have been no commits to CVS in 3 years and the issue queue has been inactive with this post asking about the status of the project going unanswered by a maintainer for almost 2 years.

I don't think this has to be a negative thing. We have amassed a large group of Drupal and CiviCRM people to work on this project. We would very much appreciate your guidance/help/leadership - whatever you may wish to contribute to the project. We want to collaborate as much as possible and want you to be involved.

We have set up a website to centralize discussion and information on the project:

http://dropcrm.org/

You can find a list of people who have put their name forward to work on the project in the following pad:

http://pad.freestylesystems.co.uk:9000/A14CbLWyCe

As you can see we have gathered quite a lot of willing individuals and it would be a huge shame to go our separate ways and build 2 separate systems. I don't think this would be good for Drupal or any of those concerned.

Please consider whether you would like to work together on this and let us know. We would be overjoyed if you would join us.

However, if you decide that you would rather build your own CRM, separate to our efforts, then I would recommend that the project be handed back to you.

Hi psynaptic,

Thank you for your response!

Is it possible to consider that collaboration with your initiative and reclaiming this namespace need not be mutually exclusive options?

I am trying to be sensitive to the fact that the majority of the people subscribed to the webmaster's queue have no interest in the tactical aspects of Drupal-as-CRM (or if they are interested, they're following this initiative thorough more appropriate channels). For the d.o webmasters, the critical path is "how do we mark issue #332735 as 'closed' in the most fair and satisfying way possible?"

For the webmasters here, the first question is, "is it fair that this namespace was revoked?", and the second question is, "is it fair to undo that?" Anyone who has asked me about this has heard my thoughts and intentions. The key is that I was never asked.

Meanwhile, there are specific goals for the CRM project, and both committed and un-committed code (as of Februrary). I don't think it's fair to judge me by commit count, when nobody else has committed any code (and rightly so - a monolithic CRM module is *not* what Drupal needs!) I'm not certain that I'll be able to convince others of what my plans are (I'm more about API's and observation than entities and structure). Similarly, I'm not entirely convinced that I agree with all of the goals in the initiative. But I'm certainly open to participating in the dialog, and that's a good starting place for everyone.

"CRM" is a tough nut to crack - too flexible? not flexible enough? Even the acronym itself has different definitions, and there are a dozen conflicting workflows that pop into peoples' heads when they hear it. It's not such a bad thing to have *both* collaborative discussions *and* divergent codebases to flush out what ultimately works well.

I feel I am being asked to decide between keeping my entitlement to this namespace and playing well with others. Is it possible for me to do both? To regain my ability to demonstrate my ideas in the project I registered in 2007, while concurrently participating in this overall dialog?

And, for the webmasters' sake, can we decouple the maintainership discussion from the CRM discussion?

So, after some thought, I've decided to give Allie the project back.

She has assured me that she doesn't only want to have it for the cool namespace, but that she has actual plans.

I am confident that she'll cooperate with other interested parties.

I am also confident that she'll hand the space over to psynaptic again if she finds that her plans don't work out.

Fair enough.

I just think working separately on two different systems is going to be a huge waste of time. It would be much better for us all to work together towards the same goal.

I totally encourage this, but please discuss this in the CRM issue queue.

Sorry for coming late to the game here.

FTR, I'm perfectly happy with the result of giving the project back to Allie, but I hope she realizes that it was an innocent miscommunication, and I don't believe for a second that anyone was intending to be "discourteous" or "self-serving." I honestly believed the project had been abandoned.

Also, I'm also not opposed to two separate efforts moving forward simultaneously. "Survival of the fittest" has served Drupal contrib fairly well, IMO. Perhaps the history books will one day rename DropCRM to FlexiCRM...

In any case, the invitation remains open to join us at dropcrm.org for a discussion about how to crack this nut. I for one would love to hear more about your goals, and how they diverge from what I've proposed for DropCRM. I hope that I'm open-minded enough to be persuaded when a better, well-defined idea presents itself.

Either way, Best of luck.

Reopening to see if there have been any updates since August 2010 when this was auto-closed. There does not appear to have been any activity in the past 5+ years on this project. Reopening rather than creating a new issue because this already has interested followers.

Should this "CRM" project be repurposed so that its main page just points to other more-active CRM initiatives and work? Such as

• - the CRM group
• - the CiviCRM project
• - the Redhen CRM project
• - the CRM Core project
• - the ERPAL project

I am asking because there does not appear to have been any activity here for many years.

For what it's worth, I think many people who want a CRM solution have moved beyond "CRM" and actually want an easily expandable XRM platform -- even if they don't know they want it -- upon which a CRM solution has been built. And by "easily expandable", I mean expandable through configuration that is largely point-and-click rather than via low-level PHP coding within the Drupal module and hooks paradigm.

If Allie is willing to merge the project (or release the name), I would also suggest the obvious candidate is OpenCRM, which is a wrapper for a native Drupal CRM release based on Party, and which is currently undergoing active D8 development.

I am closing this issue since the project doesn't have a release for a supported Drupal version.