Hey guys, what’s up? I’m finally in the last phase of getting my driving license, so that’s taking up some of my time too.
The CRM is now online at crm.alessio.hackclub.app. The VPS has very little RAM, so I build the Docker images locally and transfer them to the server using docker save over SSH. It’s not the fanciest deployment process, but it works with the resources I have, so I’ll stick to it for now.

One of the main things I worked on was the customer portal. The backend from last week finally has a frontend: customers can log in, see their tickets and documents, open requests, reply to messages, download PDFs and accept quotes.

I also made sure that internal notes stay internal. Notes now have a Visible to customer checkbox, which is disabled by default. The portal only shows notes explicitly marked as visible, so there’s less risk of accidentally exposing something that should stay private.

Another feature I added is Google Calendar import. It’s read-only for now, so the CRM can import events without modifying anything in your Google account. Events are created through the same service as normal CRM records, meaning workflows and the audit log still work as expected. Sync runs every 15 minutes, and if something goes wrong with an account, it won’t stop the others from syncing.

I also started replacing the Google Translate workaround with proper internationalization (i18n). The translation system is in place, including support for parameters and locale-aware dates and numbers. The dictionary is type-checked, too, so missing English translations can be caught at compile time.
There’s still a lot of work here: around 1,200 strings need to be translated by hand. It’s not the most exciting task, but I’d rather have proper translations than rely on Google Translate forever. Obviously that’s my opionion.

I also started working on public registration, but it’s not ready yet. There’s one important limitation: the CRM currently has a single shared workspace, so everyone who registers would see the same data. Registration will stay disabled unless explicitly enabled until I decide how to handle that properly.
That’s because the idea is to have 1 single DB for each workspace, since the CRM should be self-hosted.

There’s still work to do, but the CRM is getting closer to the version I wanted to ship.
See you in the next devlog!