Over the past few months, I've been working with Kurt to evaluate LedgerSMB, a Perl-based accounting system that we thought we might be able to start using for our Perl Foundation accounting. So far, it looks promising and we're continuing our evaluation on a demo install.
I've been looking for an open source package because we want the flexibility to integrate with Act, the conference software used by many Perl events, and with our donation site. And this leads me to my next investigation. I'd really like to deploy a customer relationship management (CRM) package to allow us to better track our relationships with our donors, big and small.
I was a bit surprised to turn up next to nothing when I typed "perl CRM" into Google. In fact, all I found was someone else looking for one too.
So here's my call for help finding a Perl-based CRM. Do you know of one?
If I can't find one, I'll probably start evaluating CiviCRM since that seems popular with non-profits. I've also worked with SugarCRM and might consider that again, but it's very business-centered. In either case, any customization will be slow since I'm no PHP expert. I'd really prefer a Perl-based solution if one is out there.
November and December saw the usual monthly release of Parrot. However, November's release was particularly notable, as it was version 0.5.0. The minor version number increase came because it includes an implementation of the object design as specified in PDD15. This was a major piece of work, both in the implementation, and integration with existing language implementaitons.
The 0.5.1 release was also quite exciting. The major work for this release was converting a number of language implementations to use the new Parrot Compiler Toolkit, which includes NQP, a simple subset of Perl 6. This means that Parrot's Perl 6 implementation is now largely written in NQP, which is important since the use of NQP opens up compiler development to anyone who can write in a Perl-like language, as opposed to anyone who can write C or Parrot assembler.
Continue reading Parrot Grant Update for November and December.