CRM

:::info Phases 1 and 2 are built Contacts and companies (Phase 1) and the sales pipeline (Phase 2) are complete and arrive with the next release. Email marketing, automations and scoring follow; the roadmap tracks each phase against the code as it lands. :::

The CRM is a complete customer system inside your WordPress site: the people and companies you work with, the deals you are chasing, the emails you send them, and the automations that follow up for you. Your data stays in your own database, with no per-contact fees and no outside service to sign up to.

It grows out of the Newsletter / Subscriber CRM extension, which is renamed to CRM and reorganized: its email builder, campaigns, sending queue, lists, tags, segments, double opt-in and form integration carry over, and the newsletter subscriber grows into a full contact.

In this manual

Start here: Getting started: turn the CRM on, choose modules, add your team and bring in your contacts.

Contacts and companies

• Contacts: the contact record, stages, owners, notes and the timeline
• Companies and custom fields
• Lists, tags and segments
• Import and export (CSV import with a dry run and undo)
• Leads from your forms: contact, booking and newsletter forms
• Duplicates and merging
• Consent and privacy

Sales pipeline

• Pipelines and deals: the drag-and-drop deals board
• Products and line items, including WooCommerce products
• Tasks, calls and meetings and the calendar
• Email and replies: one-to-one email and replies on the timeline
• Files on records and sales reports

Workspace and team: Home dashboard, team roles, bin and audit log, modules and settings.

Developers: REST API, PHP API and hooks, create a custom module, webhooks.

Finding your way around

Open Unyson+ → CRM and the CRM takes over the screen like an app of its own:

• The CRM sidebar lists every area: Home, Contacts, Companies, Deals, Tasks, Calendar, Campaigns, Lists & segments, Reports, Import / Export, Custom fields, Bin, Audit log, Webhooks, Modules and Settings. Areas that belong to a module you switched off are hidden.
• The WordPress menu folds to its icons while you are in the CRM and comes back when you leave. Hide the WordPress menu at the bottom of the CRM sidebar removes it altogether (your choice is remembered), and Back to WordPress takes you to the dashboard.
• The top bar has search across contacts and companies (press / to jump to it) and a New menu for a contact, a company, a deal, a task, an email campaign or a CSV import.
• Home shows where things stand: how many contacts and how many are new, contacts by lifecycle stage, the pipeline, your tasks, what happened lately, the newest contacts and your campaigns, in cards each person can rearrange. An empty CRM shows the three ways people arrive instead: added by hand, imported, or collected by a form on your site.
• A contact's page has their details and your own fields (edit them in place), a stage picker, notes and the full timeline, the companies they work at, their lists and tags, their email status and the consent log with the exact wording they agreed to. A company's page works the same way and lists its people.

Adding someone by hand never subscribes them to your emails; email consent only comes from the person.

What it covers

The CRM is one extension: a small core that is always on, and modules you switch on under CRM → Modules when you need them. A new site is asked what it will use the CRM for and starts with only that, so a beginner is never faced with tools they do not use. A module that is off loads no code and adds no menus.

Part	What it does
The core (always on)	People with an owner, a lifecycle stage and your own fields; lists, tags and rule-based segments; one activity timeline per record; tasks with reminders; files; CSV import and export; consent and privacy built in
Companies	The organisations your contacts work for, each with a record, a timeline and its people
Sales pipeline	Several pipelines with their own stages, a drag-and-drop deal board, deal pages, products and sales reports
Calendar	Calls, meetings and dated tasks on a month, week and day calendar
Email conversations	One-to-one email from a contact's record, and their replies on the timeline
Audit log	Who changed, exported, merged or deleted what
Webhooks	CRM events sent to other apps as signed JSON the moment they happen
Email marketing	Campaigns built in a block email builder from a template gallery, double opt-in, a preference page, batched sending through SMTP or an email service, and open and click reports
Automations	Triggers (a form, a tag, a date, a deal stage, a purchase) start a flow of steps: send an email, wait, branch, change tags, move a deal, create a task, call a webhook
Scoring and site activity	Points for what contacts do, and the pages known contacts read, so the warmest leads come first

How it fits with the rest of Unyson+

• Other extensions. The CRM offers a versioned PHP API, a catalogue of events and REST endpoints, so other extensions read and change contacts, tags and deals without touching its tables, and can add their own triggers, actions, fields and timeline entries. A planned Membership extension (its own extension, for members-only content, levels and renewals) connects this way, as does WooCommerce.

• Forms. A contact or booking form can add its senders to the CRM: it creates or updates the contact, saves the answers you choose (to contact fields or custom fields it creates for you), keeps the whole submission on the timeline, and can turn a booking into a deal or a meeting. People are only subscribed to your emails when they tick a consent box. See Leads from your forms.

• Newsletter element. Signups from the Newsletter element become contacts.

• AI Assistant. A connected AI app can set the CRM up through its tools (fields, lists, segments, pipelines, campaigns, automations), but no tool reads or contacts the people in it.

• The CRM website generator builds its sites on the CRM: a real pipeline and a welcome automation.

Built for ordinary hosting

Sending and automations run as small batches in the background, so no single request runs long enough to hit a host's time limit. Two things make it reliable on shared hosting such as cPanel:

1. A real cron job. WordPress's own scheduler only runs when someone visits the site, so an automation's "wait three days" could fire late on a quiet site. The CRM checks the scheduler and gives you the exact line to add as a cron job in your hosting panel (every five minutes is plenty).
2. An email service for campaigns. Shared hosts limit how many emails a site may send per hour, and their shared mail servers often land in spam. Campaigns are queued by the CRM and delivered through SMTP or an email service's API.

Sites with up to tens of thousands of contacts run comfortably on good shared hosting. Much larger lists and very large sends are better on a VPS or managed WordPress hosting.

Design decisions

• Grow the existing extension, don't start over. The Newsletter / Subscriber CRM already has a working email builder, campaigns and sender, so it is renamed and reorganized rather than rewritten.
• One extension with switchable modules, not several extensions: one download, one version, one settings screen, and every module shares one contact record.
• A contact is not a WordPress user. Contacts are light records; a WordPress user is linked to a contact only when someone needs to log in (the Membership extension does this).
• Membership is a separate extension. It has its own scope (levels, a member area, login, renewals, payments) and some membership sites need no CRM. It connects to the CRM through the public API, so access can follow CRM tags and lists, and membership events reach the CRM's timeline and automations.
• Built to grow. Other extensions use the public API and events, never the tables; every schema change is a numbered migration; and modules stay independent, so new ones can be added later without reworking the core.
• Team roles from the start. A CRM manager sees everything; a sales rep sees only the records they own.