In this chapter, we will begin covering one of the greatest advantages of Odoo: the ability to customize the software to meet the unique needs of your business. Fortunately, Odoo provides a great deal of flexibility in which you can customize it without writing any code or developing a module. We will begin by learning how to activate Odoo's developer mode and then back up our database, which is a very important practice when customizing Odoo. After that, we will learn how to add fields to our database and display them on forms and views. Note that customizing Odoo is a very broad topic that would ideally span across multiple chapters; you might consider this an introduction to customization.

The following topics are covered in this chapter:

• Understanding the Odoo architecture
• Entering and exiting developer mode
• Backing up your database
• Restoring data from a backup
• Appending custom fields to models
• Displaying newly added fields in forms and list views