On his site Nick Basile has a new post sharing some of the ways you can improve an installation of Laravel Nova (the administration dashboard) for a CRM. This latest tutorial is the second part in his series (part one is here).

In my last post, we started building a simple CRM using Laravel Nova. It was pretty complete when we left it, but I think we can add a few more features and explore the rest of what Nova has to offer. In this walkthrough, we'll take a look at how to use Nova's Actions and authorization.

He walks through the additions and improvements he's added to his Nova dashboard:

• an Action that automates the updating of a lead's status
• additional authorization checks using policies for model delation

Code is included for each of these along with a summary that walks you through the creation and integration process.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a list of seven customer relationship management tools (CRM) that play nice with Drupal, a popular PHP-driven content management system.

Whether you want to call Drupal a CMS (Content Management System), a CMF (Content Management Framework) or a CMSomething, the ‘C’ always stands for Content. Content is where Drupal shines and is what it’s designed for. [...] When an organisation is at a stage and mindset that they also want to manage their contacts and interactions effectively they will often need tools designed specifically for that function. These are generally referred to as a CRM, which stands for Client Relationship Manager or Constituent Relationship Manager, depending on the sector (For-Profit or Not-for-Profit respectively)

[...] What has a CRM got to do with Drupal? Nothing directly, but indirectly if you’re looking to streamline your business operations and automate the ways people can interact with you, your CRM will need to work well with your website. [...] In this article, we will look at several of the big players in the CRM space that work well with Drupal, how they integrate or how developers can get them to integrate.

They start with a list of five of the seven options:

• Roll it yourself
• RedHen
• CiviCRM
• Salesforce
• Sugar CRM

They also provide a few other options combining a few technologies: Microsoft Dynamics and BlackBaud or Nation Builder and Salsa. Links and a brief summary of the project are included for each item in the list. He ends with a few tips about the actual integration, including the use of the CRM tool's API or using the Migrate Drupal module.

In a new post to his blog Court Ewing takes a look at integrating your PHP application with one of the most popular and powerful CRM solutions out there, Salesforce.

If your primary clientele is small to medium business owners, as I imagine is the case for most professional developers these days, chances are you have developed custom applications that interact with Salesforce CRM. For those of you that have not had the delight of integrating with Salesforce, let's walk through the most common integration techniques.

He starts with the Force.com web services and shows how to generate your WSDL, get your security token for requests and gives some example code that uses both to test the login. He follows this with examples of the five methods that are a "must know" for anyone using the API - upsert, retrieve, getUpdated, delete, getDeleted. He throws in a few "gotchas" at the end - one dealing with retrieve calls and their results and the other relates to how the PHP toolkit handles errors.