Hi everyone 
I had a request from user and made some improvements to my PowerReplacer SuiteCRM add-on that I am sure can be generically useful for many others. I had great fun getting back to work on this, it had been a long time!
Emails from Workflows
Up until now, there were two places from which you could launch emails based on the advanced templating system I developed:
- Campaigns
- Compose Email window
The new version will add to this a new possibility:
- Sending from inside a Workflow Action
This is interesting in many different ways, because Workflows are really powerful and versatile. With my advanced templates, it’s easy to grab data from related records, test conditions, etc, so that the emails look just right and you can really automate things and save on manual processes.
And those emails would be much more useful if you could have Dynamic Attachments…
For example, my user’s requirement was to attach not a static document, but rather a document specific to the user being emailed, so this had to be obtained from a related record (a Document or a Note) which had been previously uploaded.
PowerReplacer does dynamic attachments, so this is possible, and even more would be possible: the document (let’s imagine, a monthly report or a balance of a current account) could be just left on disk, provided by the accounting department or from another app, together with every other client’s document. And the template would pick up the correct document automatically (based on some nomenclature of the file name), relate it to the user, attach to the email, and send. Think of how much time can be saved, and how many human errors can be avoided!
What if you could manipulate The Process from inside the template… 
?
PowerReplacer is getting so powerful that I am starting to think of it as "SuiteCRM Low Code 
".
So, “the process” here is “sending an email”. Initially, the template just affected the text to be sent. But sometimes what you really want to do there is change the process itself. Things like…
- add a BCC of the user assigned to that record, so she can check how the email looked, and be in touch with what the client is receiving
- add a CC to the manager if the opportunity value is over a certain amount
- do other side-effects like additional logging and notification
- simply order the cancellation of the email if some condition occurs
This last item is waaay more powerful than it looks. Think about how you can revolutionize the way you do Campaigns and manage Target Lists. You can have your Campaigns target everyone, and then restrict (through the cancel feature triggered from inside the low-code template) who actually gets the email by any condition(s) in that record or in any related record.
This is like having the ability to automatically generate Target lists on the fly, with elaborate conditions.
Project maintenance
I also worked on…
- making all my add-ons compatible with 7.12.x
- making PDF generation work with the TCPDF engine after mPDF was deprecated
And soon hope to
- make them all compatible with 8.x (except some PowerWorkflows features which won’t work on the new views)
I have plenty more ideas, so stay tuned 