The team is starting to roll on CiviCRM v3.1. One of the sponsored items is the ability to allow one custom group to be used with multiple relationship types. I'll use relationship types as my example here. This feature will also work with other objects that can be extended: specifically In v3.0 and prior a custom group can only be used for one specific relationship type. This feature will allow a custom group to extend one or more relationship types.

There was a thread in the forum a few weeks ago about adding generic replacements for tokens that dont have a value for a specific contact. An example is where the first name field is blank and the organization would want to substitute friend or member instead of keeping it blank. The token engine does not provide this functionality by default, however implementing it via a hook is relatively trivial.

I just checked in a few changes that allows a CiviCRM install to use a memcached server if available. We use the php memcached integration to make this possible.

I've spent a fair amount of time in the past two weeks figuring out how we could optimize and improve CiviCRM. Its been an interesting few days and I suspect will become more interesting over the next few days as we start implementing a few things. All this is in preparation for doing a pretty major load test for the Branner project.

Two articles worth mentioning and thinking about, culled from the fairly informative N-TEN Connect

• Evaluating a Community - by Seth Gottlieb. A pretty good read on factors to consider when choosing to adopt/integrate an open source project. CiviCRM does use a fair number of other open source projects and we use quite a few of the factors Seth describes when we choose a project. We also hope CiviCRM comes off in a positive light when folks out there are looking for a relationship management system
  

CiviCRM 1.6: A Free and Open Source eCRM Solution

We are pleased to announce the latest release of CiviCRM – version 1.6.

Special thanks to the dedicated folks who contributed to this release by testing the alpha and beta revisions – and to everyone in the community who provided new ideas, feedback (especially critical feedback), and patches.

CiviCRM is the first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, internationalised, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

Trying to get our arms around how to load test CiviCRM and it is turning out to be a major issue with quite a few steps. This post is primarily for us to sort things out and make sure we are on the right path. So here are the specific steps and various programs we'll use to test things out:

Wikipedia Fundraising C.O.R.E designed and developed by the folks at Four Kitchen Studios is using CiviCRM v1.5 and Drupal 4.7. In their own words:

Just to set better context, here is our load testing scenario:

• Implement the College Prep Application for 2007 on CiviCRM v1.6
• Deploy the above application on the network as configured when it goes live.
• Use a load testing program to simulate n students hitting the application simultaneously with random sleep/think times. If possible, simulate some form errors also. Data to be used from last year's application which has been randomized and munged with. The data is hierarchical and in a simple xml format.
• Increase the number of students in a methodical manner and measure various parameters including: load and memory utilization on each web server and database machine, network bandwidth, overall throughput, processing time per page and application.
• Optimize the architecture / CiviCRM code and improve results. Ideally we'd like to be able to handle 2K - 5K users simultaneously quite efficiently.

One of our major goals for this year is to optimize CiviCRM to handle load in a graceful manner. This is extremely important for us with the Branner Project. One of our main goals for the project this year is to optimize CiviCRM to be able to handle the last weekend load nicely (similar to the slashdot effect, the application process has most of the applications being filed and completed the weekend it is due)