Building a CRM System on Rails

Peter Marklund

marklunds.com

Agenda

• Background and Overview
• Functionality and Architecture
• Selected Hacks
• More Hacks
• Testing
• Infrastructure and Deployment
• Discussion/Questions

Background and Overview

• Green Media Toolshed - helping environmental organizations reach the media
• Member Sites - publishing tool on Drupal (PHP/MySQL)
• Volunteer Hub - collaborative updating of contact info on Rails (PostgreSQL)
• Media Contact Manager (MCM) - CRM on Rails (PostgreSQL)

Functionality and Design

• Advanced search for contacts and outlets
• Creating lists of contacts and outlets
• Sending email and fax to those lists
• Web 2.0 design by ScratchMedia

Database Schema

• outlets - New York Times, has many locations
• locations - Manhattan Office, has many jobs
• jobs - Editor, belongs to contact
• contacts - Jim Smith, has many jobs
• lists, many-to-many relationship with jobs and outlets
• bulk_emails (draft, scheduled, sent, send_error)
• emails (sent, address_missing, send_error, bounced,duplicate)
• faxes (request_sent, request_error, request_invalid, address_missing, sent, send_failure, duplicate)

Stats

• 7000 LOC
• 37 controllers, 60 models, 189 views and partials
• 90 migrations
• 800 revisions in Subversion since january

Selected Hacks

• Live search
• HTML tables with hidable columns (user preference)
• Scheduled jobs
• File storage
• TinyMCE WYSIWYG
• Dynarch calendar

More Hacks

• Faxing with MyFax.com web service API
• Timezones
• Go Back links
• Items per page (user preference)
• Talking to multiple databases
• Help Texts
• FasterCSV

Testing

• 7000 LOC, Code to test ratio 1:0.9, about 10,000 assertions in 400 tests
• HTML validation with Tidy and W3C
• HTML quoting - h(my_var) and link_to h(my_var)
• WWW::Mechanize for monitoring production server?
• Checking for broken links, submitting forms?
• Comprehensive suite of unit, controller, and integration tests
• Test coverage?

Infrastructure and Deployment

• Rails 1.1.6 / LightTPD / FastCGI / PostgreSQL
• Subversion, Trac, and Mantis
• Frequent server updates using Capistrano and rake deploy
• Staging and production servers
• Red Hat Enterprise at Rackspace
• Error notifications
• filter_parameter_logging("password") if RAILS_ENV == 'production'
• Monitoring? Response times?

Discussion/Questions

• Rails makes life easier - but not easy enough?
• Deployment is still hard
• Reuse in the large (Zope, Drupal) vs in the small (Rails). Middle ground? Implications for SOA?

Thanks

• Thanks to Jarkko Laine, Paul Doerwald, and the GMT team for all the great work
• Thanks to Johan Lind and Valtech for hosting this meetup