After a long work of integrating the fixes and patches offered by the community of developers of the free version of Vtiger CRM, the long awaited version 7.3 is finally released with an emphasis on security, stability, bug fixing and compatibility with PHP 7.3+.
This version of the popular open-source CRM software was expected in several ways. A special mention to Uma at Vtiger for her tireless work over the past few weeks in merging all this code!
From the official announcement
Vtiger 7.3 in summary
- 20 security improvements;
- 25 general improvements;
- 84 bugs fixed;
- 20 improvements in mobile ergonomics;
- 3 performance improvements;
Notable improvements
- Responsive layout support to make it accessible from mobile browsers;
- User level setting for the default landing page;
- Code made compatible for PHP 7.3 and later;
- We have cleared the warnings by removing signature incompatibilities, calls to obsolete functions;
- Added checkbox in mass edit to allow mass deletion of specific field values;
- Improved scheduled import to alert administrators if the CRON task has not been activated;
- Improved roll-up comments to display child module records;
- Improved web services API;
- Improved Customer Portal email template;
- Code cleanup, Soap Services;
- Improved retrieval of associated records;
(free translation taken from the release announcement of version 7.3)
An expected release
To better understand the context of this release, we must first go back to the many years when version 6 of Vtiger has established itself as a rather mature and complete all-purpose CRM software solution. Many features were already available in this version, including the possibility of making themes (skins) for example, all based on an evolution of what Sugar CRM was, the software that served as the initial basis for Vtiger CRM. However, this presentation base and the underlying code were getting dated and there was a need for better, more modern integration. This led to the release of version 7.0 which had been considerably redesigned using, among other things, a brand new layout based on Bootstrap.
So here we are at version 7.0 … this new version released in [2018] was very promising, but not yet stable enough or fully integrated with its new Bootstrap markup in order to be 100% “mobile-friendly”. In the context where the company Vtiger increasingly puts forward its cloud version of the software on a model (SAAS), the future of the open-source version of the software has nevertheless been called into question in the mind of some. There followed a work of successive updates from version 7.0 to 7.01, then 7.1.0, 7.2.0 and finally, version 7.3.0 which in our opinion seems the first truly stable version of Vtiger 7!
The CRM software market is evolving but also moving and the presence of open source software offering powerful functionalities remains essential for small and medium-sized businesses in particular. Not to mention all those who already use the Vtiger 6 or 7 software and who wish to continue using it for a long time! With its excellent data import and export capabilities, interoperability and great flexibility, Vtiger is a very good “springboard” or “buffer” software that can either replace several software used by an organization, or serve to “bridge” between them, or to fulfill a specific task that no other software can do.
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