django-highrise 0.1

Highrise CRM integration for Django projects.

# Django-Highrise

This app provides integration between Django and Highrise, which is used to provide CRM capabilities.

Currently this supports only one operation - syncing a user to Highrise.

It uses the (pyrise)[https://github.com/feedmagnet/pyrise] library.

## Why bother?

Django is a great web app framework, it’s not such a good CRM tool. Sometimes you need a little bit extra. Highrise is a simple CRM product from the guys behind Basecamp. It allows you to keep tabs on contacts (amongst a lot of other sales-related stuff), and has a great email integration feature. You can read more about it [here](http://highrisehq.com/signup).

## Tell me more

This app simplifies the process of integrating with Highrise. It provides the API hooks to allow you to push django user records into Highrise, and to read a Highrise contact’s feed (notes, emails, comments) back out. Where and when you use these hooks is up to you. It could be at the point of user registration, it could be through the Django admin site, it could even be from the command line, run as a batch job overnight.

Under the hood django-highrise is a wrapper around pyrise, and so the objects returned are standard pyrise Person, Note, Email objects. This allows you to use them in your own code, for instance for adding additional attributes beyond just the core User attributes.

The app does come with a single model - HighriseContact. This is used to track the fact that a User has been synced with Highrise, and to contain some basic utility attributes that make further integration easier.

## Network considerations

It is very important to bear in mind that this app makes a number of calls across the public internet, and is therefore neither highly performant, nor immune to standard network connectivity issues. It should not therefore be integrated in any area of your application where an unexpected 30s network time- out would cause a problem. e.g. do not include this as a synchronous call in your registration process.

When you sync a User to Highrise two network calls take place: first, a GET is issued to the API to fetch any possible matches, then, if none are found, a POST is issued to push the new contact to the API. If you wanted to add further attributes to the Person and save those back to Highrise, that would be three network calls. Caveat emptor.

## Show me some code

Push a django user to Highrise

>>> user = User.objects.create_user('bob', '[e-mail]', 'password')
>>> from django_highrise import sync_to_highrise as sync
>>> contact = sync(user)

Update a person in Highrise from django

>>> contact = HighriseContact.get(user=user)
>>> contact.fetch()  # fetches the latest Person from Highrise
>>> contact.person.title = "CEO"
>>> contact.person.save()

Fetch the notes about a contact from Highrise

>>> contact = sync(user)
>>> len(contact.person.notes)
2