Installing vtiger on webfaction for CRM
Vtiger is an open source CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform. Its purpose is to let you keep track of contacts, customers, mailing lists, as well as purchase orders, sales leads, create invoices, and a long etcetera. One of its strengths lies in the abundance of extensions and plugins to make it talk to various technologies (Outlook, Firefox, Mobile, etc).
Webfaction is a hosting company which I find very useful. If you're hosting for a while (3 - 5 yrs) it comes down to $5.5/mo - $6.6/mo ... and it gives you the full ssh access, easy install for lots of applications (django, drupal, wordpress, joomla, rails, turbogears, and many more). But what I like most is that when you have a problem you usually get an insightful reply in 20mn. And you can tell the tech support girl/guy is a geek who knows their stuff. Kinda like this. Anyway,
1. Create a Static/CGI/PHP-5.3 (let's call it vtiger) from the control panel, which will result in,
~/webapps/vtiger/
beging created.
2. Create a "website" pointing some domain www.mydomain.com to the application (from the control panel).
3. Create a fresh MySQL database and write down user/pwd.
4. On the command line,
$ cd ~/webapps/vtiger/ $ wget "http://sourceforge.net/projects/vtigercrm/files/vtiger CRM 5.4.0/Core Product/vtigercrm-5.4.0.tar.gz" $ tar zxf vtigercrm-5.4.0.tar.gz --strip 1
5. Now point your browser to www.mydomain.com. If you see "hello world" then back to ~/webapps/vtiger/ and rename or delete index.html. Now back to www.mydomain.com ... which should start www.mydomain.com/install.php
6. From there on you should have a website like this one guiding you through every step. Use the previous MySQL usr/pwd for the database settings, as well as webXXX.webfaction.com for the hostname (where XXX depends on your webfaction specifics).
7. That's it! Start adding lovely paying customers and useful friendly partners to your CRM! ;)