In an effort to clean up my registrar account today I set https://vtigermods.com to not renew. I have had this domain for some time and I really could have pulled the plug on it sooner but I was one of my first websites so I always just kept it online.
Way back in 2010 my workplace was about to make the move to a new CRM/Shipping software. They had previously used two separate services and were wanting to switch to a single piece of software. They also wanted an open source alternative as they had been burned in the past with vender lock-in. We stumbled across vtiger and even though it didn’t do exactly what we wanted the fact it was open source meant that we could make it. The only caveat, it was written in PHP and nobody on staff new PHP. So me being the go getter I am volunteered to learn and began customizing the vtiger code to suit our specific needs.
After making numerous changes to the code we essentially had a pretty awesome platform. And I became hooked on PHP. If it wasn’t for vtiger, I would not have learned PHP and likely would not be running my own software development company at this very moment.
After we had been running our customized version of vtiger for about a year I decided I should share some of the code for my customizations to the world in the form of a blog. I would slowly post a bunch of the major changes I had made in case they could help others but mostly as a nice reference for myself. And https://vtigermods.com was born. At its peak it pulled in quite a few page views a month, way more than I had even imagined it would. I even had someone ask to be guest author at one point.
However my last post on the site was back in 2015 and all the posts dealt with our version of vtiger which was a forked version of their 5.1 branch. It just feels like the site has run its course.
Also, my former employee has just contracted me to build them a brand new custom platform to replace their now 9 year old vtiger system. It will be built from the ground up to suit their exact needs without containing all the additional modules/code that they do not need. We may even build in the ability for them to license the platform for other businesses to use.
So with the start of 2019 my career working on vtiger code is coming to a close and therefore I feel it is an apt time to shutdown https://vtigermods.com
PS I used a free website called https://pdfmyurl.com to make a PDF of the https://vtigermods.com site before I took it offline. If anyone is interested you can download a copy from http://umycode.com/mirror/vtigermods_backup_2018-12-22.pdf