Next meet up for the UK usergroup will be at the Create Centre in Bristol on Tuesday 22nd July, 4-6pm. Thanks to Dave Moreton, Circle Interactive, and and Sean Kenny, VOSCUR, for kindly organising and donating the venue. We're keeping the agenda open and attendee led so it is of maximum use: we'll start with introductions and a couple of short presentations (volunteers, anyone?), and then follow with an open discussion/round table.

If you’re running a site using Joomla you’re no doubt aware that some things which appear to be straight forward with a Drupal base aren’t so easy. Both Joomla and Drupal have their strengths and weaknesses, I just happen to be a long way down the Joomla path.

A big issue for me was how do I restrict access to my site depending on memberships to a real world (non internet) organisation. All my members have an entry in the CiviCRM database but many will not have a CMS login. Out of the box there was no real way of achieving this without getting into LDAP territory.

Long time no blog – mostly because my initial concept of bringing the multi-language features to CiviCRM was replaced with a brand new approach, which should be much more developer-friendly.
Having the contents of a CiviCRM site in multiple languages means that certain columns in the database (the user-visible ones) must be localisable – but how to implement this from the database point of view is far from obvious.

 Hey everyone,
Some technical issues sidelined me for a bit, as Linux, my PC, and code issues stalled my progress. That's what makes this endeavor exciting though, right?
Anyway, in the next week, I hope to get some changes implemented in the menus, starting with Drupal and working my way through. The hope is that the menu layout will remain the same in Drupal, Joomla! and the Standalone with the changes being to the look and feel of the menu.

The Drupal Views module has some pretty cool functionality. Views 2 fixed the "everything is a node" concept from Views 1, this enables integration with CiviCRM (which does nothing with nodes). A concise description of Views from its project page: This tool is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results.

CiviCRM profiles (in view/search mode) behaves like views. However it is not a flexible or configurable as views is for the end user. Integrating with views also allows the potential of integrating CiviCRM information with other Drupal specific information. e.g. Contact information on folks who are most active on your blog / forum / comments

I took user.views.inc as a model and started hacking away to create civicrm.views.inc. You can get a copy of that file from our svn respository. So far its quite simple and just integrates the civicrm_contact and civicrm_email tables. I hope to add the phone/address fields in the next couple of hours/days and get a better idea of how to potentially generalize it.

We made few changes to default settings for New dedupe
Now default dedupe rules settings are as follows

Fuzzy Rules for

• Individual => First Name AND Last Name AND Email
• Organization => Organization Name OR Email
• Household => Household Name OR Email

Strict Rules for

• Individual => Email
• Organization => Organization Name OR Email
• Household => Household Name OR Email

Due to the introduction of a new menu system in CiviCRM 2.1, my summer project got one more item on its list – the localisation of the menu entries.

Following on Lobo's recent blog post about missing features in CiviCRM - we decided to take a closer look at what it would take to get basic "Pledge" functionality added to CiviContribute (and then evaluate how soon we could take that "leap").

The first step was reviewing the Pledge Requirements document / discussion which has been "evolving" on the wiki over the past year or so. Then I spent some time looking at some demos of Pledge functionality in other applications.

Thanks to the folks who expressed interest in attending a CiviCRM Boot Camp in Philadelphia this summer. Unfortunately we didn't get a sufficient number of signups to justify the expense of running the session (given that we'd be covering
airfare, housing expenses etc.) - so we are forced to cancel the session.

From a forum post by Chris Burgess (with Green Party NZ). A related blog post is: Another approach to ACL and permissioning for hierarchical organizations

Our (Drupal5+CiviCRM2.0) site needed a regional ACL implementation in order to give us the ability to easily grant access for our internal staff to contacts in their geographic region. Because we have staff at a provincial, regional and branch level, we needed to be able to configure permissions for each level.

We did this by implementing code which overrides the ACL implementation in CiviCRM. I'd appreciate any input and suggestions on our methodology - it's a work in progress, but it's working well for us so far.