Introducing Professor M’s School for Gifted Coders

We’ve been working behind the scenes to create a customized version of Sugar that we’re calling the Professor M School.  The essential pieces are ready to go, and we’re thrilled to announce that the repo for the Professor M School is now public and open source.  

So what is this the Professor M School?  Let’s begin by talking about the goals for this app:

1. The app should be an authoritative example on upgrade-safe customizations.  We want you, the Sugar developers, to be able to use this app as a reference for what good, upgrade-safe customizations look like.
   
   
2. The app should provide examples of DevOps best practices when developing Sugar customizations and integrations.  For example, we want to have examples of automated test suites and how to leverage continuous integration tools.
   
   
3. The app should include common customizations so that SugarCRM’s engineers can use it for testing and validation.  When our engineers want to know if their changes are going to break common customizations, we want them to be able to use this app to find out.  Ultimately, we want to integrate the app’s automated tests into our internal continuous integration process.

With those goals in mind, we developed the scenario and use cases for the Professor M School.  The app is built around a fictitious university called Professor M’s School for Gifted Coders.  If you attended UnCon 2017, you might remember hearing about Professor M.  We’ve built on what we created for UnCon in order to create the Professor M School.  

Let’s talk about the scenario behind the Professor M School.  Professor M aka Professor Marum has created an exclusive not-for-profit school for gifted coders.  The school currently uses Sugar for the following use cases:

• Managing applicants, current students, former students, and professors
• Tracking super groups affiliated with students
• Soliciting donations from alumni and alumni affiliated super groups.

Professor M will be expanding his use of Sugar to cover other use cases in the future.

To learn more about the Professor M scenario and see a demo of the customizations, check out this video I previously recorded (you might want to jump ahead to the 1:07 mark).

As I mentioned earlier, the Professor M School is open source.  Here are some ways that you can get involved:

• “Watch” the Professor M School’s GitHub repo: https://github.com/sugarcrm/school.
• Explore the code and use it as a resource as you develop your integrations and customizations.
• Submit GitHub issues if you have ideas for improvement, a feature request, or a bug report.
• Update the code and create a pull request.

We hope you find the Professor M School to be a useful resource!  Check back soon for more updates on the app!