SugarCRM 101: Upgrade Safe? Huh?

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Lexicons tend to develop around just about any facet of our cultures.  At the office, at the gym, at home -- pretty much anywhere.  

The software world is no different.  Users of any software will, over time, develop their own vocabulary to describe features and other aspects of the software. Conversely, software vendors develop their own vocabulary for the same and other components of their product.  Because these two lists don't always match, communication between the parties can sometimes become a bit blurred. It can be further complicated by the fact that vendors tend to use words common to the software publishing industry.  

Of course, the user base tends to represent a wide variety of industries, thus, the terms used by software vendors tend to be foreign to many users.

Under most scenarios, this gap in comprehension usually does not present problems. However, it can also cause great confusion and potential problems.  

Following is a mini glossary of terms popular within the SugarCRM community which are helpful to know:

BETA - Refers to software that is still under active development and testing.  It should NOT be used in a production environment.  See this previous post for other surrounding issues on this topic. 

RC - Abbreviation for Release Candidate and represents a version of the software that is almost ready for the masses. The point of significance to note is that an upgrade path to official release versions is provided and these versions can be used in production if desired.

Upgrade Safe - A customization technique emphasizing the application of customizations in such a way where future upgrades to the SugarCRM installation will not overwrite or disable such changes.  This is the preferred technique.  While many customizations are possible using this technique, not ALL desired customizations are upgrade safe.

ListView - Line item listing display of data commonly found when one selects a module within SugarCRM.

DetailView - Display for a record selected from ListView, demonstrating more information on the selected record, including related data which is displayed in subpanels.

EditView - Screen where edits to record can be made/applied, commonly accessed via the Edit button the DetailView.

Stack - The software bundle, or combination of interlinked technologies, used to host the SugarCRM installation.  For the purposes of SugarCRM, A stack is comprised of the operating system (Windows, Linux, etc.), web server (Apache, IIS, etc.), database server (MS-SQL, MySQL, etc.) and PHP scripting language.

Hopefully these definitions will help you better understand topics relating to SugarCRM.