@chris001 just kind of limited by my Github skills. Not really sure how to make all the changes a single PR. There are quite a lot. All changes kind of have to be done together because one breaks something else and then that fix breaks something else. It took me a couple of months of investigation and testing to root most of it out. Iāll try and do some investigation into how to accomplish that.
@pstevens This is an easy one to solve. In order to get all your many changes (across multiple code files) into one PR, you simply modify all the files that need modifying, in your own fork (copy) and in your branch associated with the PR. Github will tell you (or already told you) the name of your branch relating to your PR. Step by step example:
- Go to the first file you want to modify, on the SA repo for v7, in the
hotfixbranch. - Click the pencil icon to start modifying the FIRST file of this all-in-one PR.
- Modify the file.
- Make note of the name of YOUR forkās branch name (something like
pstevens-029) this is located at the top of the page. - Click Save to save this modified file to your fork/branch.
- Create the PR, title it āFix #xxxxx (thatās the issue number) Group Email not working (exact title of the issue number)ā .
- Go to YOUR fork (github dot come user pstevens, your copy of the Suite 7 forked repo, go to YOUR branch name
pstevens-029from step 4 above). - Edit and Save ALL the OTHER files that need fixing, to solve this Group Emails Not Working issue.
- Go to your PR, in the SA repo, from step 6 above. Verify that ALL of these fixed files automatically have shown up as part of your one PR.
- Any further mods or updates to these files, super easy. Go to your github account, edit go to YOUR fork of Suite v7, go to YOUR branch
pstevens-029, edit the files, and they automatically appear in your PR in SAās repo. Awesome!
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Why doesnāt Sales Agility development team just incorporate this bug fix into the core in the first place?
@pstevens has already done their job for them anyway and fixing it.
As for us its just to cumbersome to add all these changes just to have them blown up on each new update release and being forced to reapply them so we will for now just allow users to use their own email without access to the group mail - which is kind of sad. Wit the word āSadā I mean that it āgroup inboxesā makes sense and is a great feature to add to your teams in your company and it is a loss not to be able to use the feature to its fullest potential.
Because they have about one tenth of the resources that would be required for the project to move at the speed that people expect. There are thousands of issues and hundreds of pending fixes. Everyone thinks theirs is the critical one.
You can send them money on OpenCollective, that way they will have more resources.
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So, how could we work for Sales Agility development team for free?
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Thanks @pgr for your answer and reply.
Is there is donation link on the forums?
That is a very good question! 
There is a donation link on Github.
This is a bit hard to answer. The answer is, work on bugs on Github, test existing PRās, help here in the forums as you already do. But I must warn you that you will face moments when your work wonāt get any response and it will be frustrating.
I guess that after some time you can āsenseā which PRās theyāre paying attention to, and which ones they are trying to move forward, so you can focus on working on things where you have higher hopes of getting response from SA.
I think I found it:
Open Collective - Make your community sustainable. Collect and spend money transparently.
Although there is several and not sure all are legit:
The fake one sure looks fake.
The other ones are legit, the one they point to from their Github is the one where there is already some accumulated money, called āSuiteCRMā, so this one
I also set up my own sponsorship scheme a couple of years ago, the goal was precisely to get more small contributions from the community come together to generate āone extra developerā for SalesAgility. But it (essentially) didnāt really take off. The problem is not lack of people or lack of skills, the problem is that the economics of a free project like SuiteCRM naturally bring together a lot of people who, well, donāt have much money to spend. Or donāt want to - there are sure some big lucrative companies free-riding the projectā¦
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Thanks @pgr 
Iād love to set some money aside to this as my company grows forward and certainly will. The system is great in its core it just needs some love and care from us all.
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Just for information, I sent an email to opencollective regarding that possibly fake account, just asking if they had any guidelines on this kind of thing, and it seems they decided to ban the account!
So, now if you search for SuiteCRM in OpenCollective, you should see only the official account belonging to SalesAgility.
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From the opencolletive, some very generous monthly recurring sponsors are contributing a total of $4,889/month. This level of funding would support adding one 3/4 time developer, at 30 hours per week instead of full time 40 hours. On the basis that the goal for one full time developer is set at $6,666/month ($80,000 per year). Very nice!
Itās good, but I am afraid not all generous supporters are still ongoing - if you look at the most recent transactions, it seems one of the 2 big ones is now gone - maybe even both.
This is also my experience with my own sponsorships, people come and go; they invest in early stages (SuiteCRM has very low barriers to entry, attractive feature set, and downloading and installing is free) then they sometimes give up on the project (SuiteCRM has quite high initial hurdles).
So I tend to look at those current $4900 as a stash of money to buy one-time projects or features, not as āhire a developerā money. Yet.
We have offered many times to volunteer as a community to offer bug fixes using Githubās new feature, Codespace. This does not require me or your or anyone here to run a Virtual server or figure out how to create a debugging setup on a server or home server. Codespace allows casual users like me to spin up a Suitecrm copy completely running with xdebug and the correct php and mysql db services. All you have to do is make a fix and submit the PR. If you logoff, Codespace saves your spot so you come back and continue work. No server admin, nothing to run like Docker. But, the team at Sales Agility seems to not want the community to get involved. This is a free and excellent github service recently introduced in 2023 and intended to allow communities to get involved. There is no reason to stonewall moving this forward. SuiteCRM after all these years still has basic flaws that prevents adoption. Only a few of us who are chained to it with high friction costs of moving continue to use it. PRs that never get added after 3 years. PGRās debugging PR that would display the errors is completely ignored. Logs full of undecipherable nonsense that PGRās debug PR would fix is dormant. He should fork his own version with that debug and weād be way further ahead than these minor fixes. Going from 8.5 to 8.51 will set me backwards because I have to now go and do all those fixes like the ones above. That is insane. It isnāt money, there is something else preventing the adoption of community-based involvement.
Youāre correct! I have created a topic to upvote all pending PRs but no one seems interested to post links.
Letās get some attention!
exactly!
Iām the hold up on this one I think. I have a bunch of PRās all related to this issue. Struggling with how to merge them all into one to make it easier for the Devs to test and approve.
@pstevens, Paul, the emails are still problematic but what I canāt understand is how the Devs can be working on 8.6 and 8.7 when the email and other issues from v8.0 are being carried along with no attention. How are the Devs using v8 or are they? I think you are the only one working on the email issues.
Maybe Devs use a different fork or something. There have been a number of requests to simplify the testing with Codespace and enhance the ease for testing PRs but its seems the push is for financial donations to pursue the project. With Codespace and Xdebug we could nail these issues a lot faster then V8.6 and new stuff being added wouldnāt carry all the baggage we still have from major flaws in v8.x series of releases, some years waiting to fix such as @pgr debug PR (3 years ago or longer?).
Yeah, itās free but is that the main issue for SuiteCRM fixes? You get 16 hours free to develop stuff and then pay a miserly amount after. That gets you a virtual machine with complete stop/start protection, the ability to spool up a fully Codespaced Suitecrm with Xdebug and no need beyond a browser. Letās say 50 people want to help with a small bug and work 5-10 hours monthly versus sending thousands for a partial paid developer. Which one makes more sense? The Devs wonāt stop for a day and provide a current Codepace container with the current spec for us to work with. It might take a day to set it up and provide a container with the preferred php, database, xdebug and so forth. Might spend two days and give a few flavours. But, it has to be current code so we can work to create PRs that relate to that container.
Honestly, āfreeā issue isnāt the issue. The ability to act on these code fixes is now easier than ever if the Devs want the community to get involved. Other open source projects have utilized Codespace so the community can get involved without having to understand servers and virtual machines or spend money on debuggers and hardware. The only thing that is missing is for the Devs to stop pushing new stuff in 8.6 and 8.7 and fix 8.0 first. It is not a code issue, it seems to be a roadmap issue to ignore the past and shoot for bright, shiny, new features.
They could enlist the community to clear out all the major problems including email, constant directory permissions and ownership issues, enable a debug that is helpful like @pgr easy to implement PR and a few other roadblocks that keep traveling as baggage all the way from 8beta, 8.1 through 8.5 and logically will continue and worsen as new stuff is added.
Why is this Codespace (pick something else if you want) better? Because it puts more people in the community into the guts of the development. Obviously there is a problem somewhere on why this or some other feature isnāt being proposed at the top. Donations have failed, fixes donāt get done but new features are added. The website shows ISO accreditation and other high-end awards yet nobody in government or Buckingham palace could possibly use v8. The Devs continue to suggest that each version goes through testing and regression testing and we know that isnāt true. There are none of the stats that come out of a testing module to show the codeās level of errors at each version or how new fixes have caused other fixes to revert. How can any Dev possibly being using the group email or any server Iāve been using successfully? It isnāt possible.
My gut tells me this program has a lot of pulls and pushes not being discussed. Watching the last few years of backwards progress I can understand why nobody is tossing money in that direction. I do see a lot of people willing to spend time and resources for fixes since they are trying to use V8 for projects as we are trying. I would even suggest it makes more sense to help pay for Codespace time after 16 hours of free time. That makes the most sense to me. Most people wonāt get there.
So, if Codespace isnāt free, it is a new feature that could launch a major set of fixes into this dog. Maybe even have a working theme panel some year. I could be wrong but after 3 years email still doesnāt work and nothing to help debugging the issues like email or permissions, installation. It doesnāt have any self-awareness like knowing the php version before installation and other requirements that are necessary to prevent people giving up early during trials. This is basic stuff. Why allow people to use the wrong php version and then have to spend @PGR time explaining for years what version to use/not use?
You would think that a system purporting to have millions of downloads would have all kinds of support offers. For some reason, enlisting support at the user level isnāt really a priority. If it was, time would be set aside by the top people to figure out how to use these new tools and make it part of the process. We could be working smarter if we choose to do so. Or flail and go backwards each version. I could be wrong but just read this website and see how far back these problems go while 8.6 features are being built.
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Can I suggest that those who want to take issue with the direction SalesAgility is taking in regard to fixes, updates and upgrades, it might be a good idea to start a new thread for that purpose. This one is for group emails.
Not sure if they want this type of feedback or not, but possibly a thread on itās own is a better place. (I have a few idea too!)
Iām trying to help people here get their group emails working in this thread.
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