Only 1 theme in Suite 7.9

hi is there anywhere to get themes for suitecrm ?

Classic sugarcrm would be good?

No, sorry, this is a bad moment for SuiteCRM in regards to Themes.

Your options are:

  1. Stay with 7.8.4 (it’s Long term support) and you can choose between SuiteP, SuiteR and Suite7

  2. Go up to 7.9.1 (due any moment) and use only SuiteP

You can of course customize the theme by changing SASS variables and recompiling CSS, or by editing CSS directly.

Ah its not so bad , I quite like SuiteP. but just wanted to know my options.

Also still trying to understand suite and its relationship to sugar and modules U have for that.

Also I see in road map new frontend in ver 8.0

If you browse modules from the SuiteCRM Store you know they work in SuiteCRM. Most of them are also present in the SugarForge store, which is run by the same persons/company.

Module developers are interested in making them work in both. This is quite easy if they were developed at the time of SugarCRM 6.5, it can have more challenges if they were developed for SugarCRM 7.

I get that 7.9.1 only has one theme, but does anyone know how/where to adjust the screen spacing? i.e. putting listing views and individual fields closer together? Is there a CSS parameter somewhere that can be changed?

You can:

  • customize variables.scss and recompile sass

or

  • edit directy on style.css, moving the file to custom directory

or

  • go and get everything ready-made from here:

http://urdhva-tech.com/blogs/fine-tunning-the-suitecrm-new-theme

Those modifications look impressive. It is a shame that there is no documentation around showing exactly what CSS parameters you can tweak to change the colors, spacing and look & of the existing Suite P theme.

This would at least enable many Admin users to get something immediately in place on their instances of Suite, before more extensive format changes are facilitated via the theme configuration screens.

Those parameters are quite self-evident. And it wouldn’t make much sense, in a project that is so far behind in Documentation, to waste time documenting a manual process when you have plans to deliver a GUI for the same thing.

It all boils down to not enough developers, not enough hours in the day, we have to be patient. Or do it ourselves and contribute to the community, if we are able to.

When you are quite new to something (i.e. CSS), settings and parameters are never “self-evident”!

However, I did dive in deep this weekend, to learn and make some formatting changes, which I have shared in other posts on this part of the forum. So the modified Suite P theme is now very usable, for me.

(I would like to change from 2 to 4 columns across eventually, but that is not important at this stage).

I’ve been a bit supporter of SuiteCRM for a number of years but I have to say that this last update is simply not the most professional effort that was expected by so many of us. I was not expecting perfection but the number of problems that this new version has had coupled with the fact that there is one theme, and a totally ugly one at at that, has me wondering about what kind of decision-making is going on within SuiteCRM management.

This current theme is so totally out of character with either Suite or Sugar such that I wonder if there were any adults in the room when the decision was made to publish 7.9.

7.9 is going to cause people to take a look at options… like X2CRM and others. I know I have… at X2 and others. I can’t continue to work with Suite unless they meet my needs and the version, with such a large number of bugs and its’ totally inappropriate theme… does not.

I’m going to give SuiteCRM the benefit of the doubt that they simply screwed up with this release and wait with hope that they will fix the problems, give us a simple theme as we had before, and that they can get back on track. But I won’t wait too long. I have options.

Are any of you old enough to either remember or know the history of the Ford Edsel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel). It might be instructive here.

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Just my thoughts …

I think we should give it a little time.

I, too, was concerned by a single theme that (out-of-the-box) was not going to work for my situation. However, if you look elsewhere on these threads, there are some fairly immediate fixes for the Suite P layout “issue”.

Particularly in the case of “free software”, I think it comes down to a level of compromise and taking some own-initiatives to create a workaround solution, until future updates are released.

After all is said and done, Sales Agility (SA) IS a business, not a charity, so they have their business reasons for the path they took. The big thrust today is “mobile”, as that seems to be where the interest is, so for SA it probably made business sense to have something available in Suite for mobile users.

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I agree, with free there is some expectancy that not eveything will work the way we will all want it (but it needs to work), and each iteration should show movement on the path.

Suite want that and make effort to achieve. … its important to feedback to the Authors and maintainers.

When looking at the roadmap
https://suitecrm.com/community/roadmap

version 8 has new “New Fontend” is SuiteP it?

If Suite could come on and clarify roadmap and last release - will give confidence to the forum members that there is value to being here.

@paullm maybe you could share your findings from “dive in deep” code/directions/tutorial would be great.
I also think a 2 to 4 columns would be great - but at this point would be best if it could be responsive. Also will need to tie into the studio!

The “deep dive” I did this past weekend and the changes I made to 7.9.1 are actually documented in my other posts in this section of the forum.

(My background: an age-old COBOL programmer, who is also a pragmatist when it comes to software! The object programming, PHP and CSS world is somewhat alien to me, but I am prepared to dig in and stumble around … AND share what I find).

One of the biggest “revelations” to me was just being able to inspect a web page element (in Chrome) to see the underlying CSS code. With this in hand, I was then able to search and edit my “style.css” file to tweak things to my liking!

Bluntly, the options available for SuiteCRM users … stay with 7.8.x (and any subsequent updates that may be released) or make the switch to 7.9.x. The reality is that nothing major is going to happen with 7.8 and many of its outstanding bugs will now never be addressed. 7.9.x is where the focus will be and it all comes down to $$$.

Whether or not to switch is an individual, case-by-case, decision. Some users have fairly vanilla installations of Suite, so some of the more obscure bugs will never surface. However, others have highly-customized Suite instances, where a single fundamental bug could be fairly crippling.

If 7.8.x is working OK for you, you might want to consider staying there until a few more releases of 7.9 have cleaned out the major issues.

Some Suite users may currently be looking at other CRMs, but migrating any CRM data to another CRM is NOT a minor undertaking!

Personally, the major attraction of Suite (following on from Sugar) was simply its underlying structure and the ability to essentially mold the software into just about whatever you want it to be … even something that is not a CRM!

When you strip everything down, SuiteCRM is merely a set of web-based “building blocks” … modules are constructed and they can then all be linked together. For me, that is huge!

Firstly I’d like to make it clear that we supply SuiteCRM to many businesses and have more than one thousand users. To date, we have supplied SuiteCRM with our own theme. The theme looks a lot like Xero a leading bookkeeping solution. It is not simply a case of adding beautiful icons and cool colours. SuiteP looks nice but does a fanatastic job at hiding the actual data you need to see. Just sit back for a moment and look at a screen… what stands out of the page? The Account Name? no. Any data? no. lots of grey sections? yes.

All of our clients refuse to upgrade. They love the Xero theme.

We are happy to pay for Suite. If it has to be free software then please allow us to customise it.

Just to clarify - we are FibreCRM and not associated in anyway with Sales Agility.

Sales Agility needs to be careful that it does not go down the same path that Sugar took and leaving a large community of users out to dry. We have a large community of Suite users that like the 7.8 theme (like old sugar) and who do not want the new 7.9 theme (the same approach sugar took with Sugar7). Customers will leave in droves

SuiteP looks: 8/10
SuiteP practicality: 0/10

@stevejenkin …

Sales Agility has already expressed its intent to keep Suite CRM free and updated. However, they ARE a commercial operation so they, like you, need to follow the money, to some degree.

Most of us understand that and can work within that framework.

The need to go with a “single” theme was explained elsewhere on this forum. The old Suite R and Suite 7 themes were discrete components and required too many resources to keep them all updated with the new features being added in 7.9.x and beyond.

However, SA has also announced its long-term support for 7.8.x and the Suite R/Suite 7 themes. You just won’t have access to these newer features (e.g. email) by staying with 7.8.x.

While the main gripe with 7.9.x appears to be the “look”, it is a relatively easy css fix and free solutions have been offered elsewhere on this forum.

I am a little surprised that you have not devoted some of your resources to “fixing” what you don’t like about the styling of Suite P.

We have devoted considerable resource to the new SuiteP theme. We removed the excessive white space, increased the font sizes where applicable and at the right time, standardised the different field types in order to create a more consistent user experience. But at the end of the day when we compared it to our current theme (our own), it was still a retrograde step for users.

SuiteP has a lot of potential and whilst we really like the responsive theme element you’ll find that most CRM users will use a desktop or tablet to access their CRM. Some applications are just not suited to mobile and CRM is one of those. Native diary & contact sync works for most (or an app).

But we’ll have to revisit SuiteP. Thanks for your response.

Then, if it’s just a theme/styling issue, you might want to run a file comparison utility (such as “diff”) on your css files against the Suite P equivalents, just to see where the differences are.

Unless you have made major functional changes elsewhere, this sounds more like a need to just merge your changes into Suite P.