Upcoming Events
San Francisco CiviCRM Meetup - March 2010
March 24th, 2010
Come meet others from the Bay Area who are interested in, using or developing (more...)
Campaigning Camp in Oxford, UK
March 25th, 2010
Free (with lunch and tea break included!) CiviCRM/Drupal and Plone two-track (more...)
CiviCRM Seminar - Dublin
March 25th, 2010
MTL Software Solutions are hosting a free seminar at The IBOA, Stephen
St (more...)
CiviCRM User Training - Atlanta (pre NTC)
April 7th, 2010
This full-day hands-on training session is aimed at non-profit staff and (more...)
Configuring, Customizing and Extending CiviCRM - San Francisco (before DrupalCon SF)
April 18th, 2010
This hands-on 1-day training session is targeted at administrators, integrators (more...)
CiviCRM User Training - San Francisco (before DrupalCon SF) This full-day hands-on training session is aimed at non-profit staff and (more...)
April 18th, 2010
CiviCon San Francisco 2010
April 22nd, 2010
Join us for the first ever CiviCon in San Francisco this April! CiviCon brings (more...)
dharmatech's blog
- Not Just a Contact Database
-
These optional components give you more power to connect and engage your supporters.

civiCONTRIBUTE
Online fundraising and donor management.

civiEVENT
Online event registration and participant tracking.

civiMEMBER
Online signup and membership management.

civiMAIL
Personalized email blasts and newsletters.

civiREPORT
Report generation and template management.
Canvass and Phonebank
Introduction: The Need
Progressive Technology Project (PTP) supports grassroots community organizing groups nationwide that engage in social, economic and environmental justice efforts to empower low-income people and communities of color. These groups conduct phone banking and field canvassing as an integral part of their base-building and voter engagement strategies to engage existing and new constituents. PTP hired DharmaTech to help them build PowerBase: a customized CiviCRM for use by community organizing groups.
PowerBase helps groups manage the following data related to phonebanking and field canvassing work:
- voter info, history, and demographics
- reason why the phonebank or canvass is taking place
- responses to questions asked during the phonebank or canvass
- phonebank or canvass status
- primary language spoken
CiviCRM and QuickBooks
About 8 weeks ago we began looking into a CiviCRM / QuickBooks integration framework. Our goal is to write a module that allows CiviCRM contributions and contact information to be written to QuickBooks. Our target version is QuickBooks 2009 Premier Non-Profit edition, since that's what we use.
At the very least, the module should be able to:
- Map sources of income in CiviCRM with accounts in QuickBooks.
- Insert Donations, Deposits and Payments from CivCRM to QuickBooks.
- A seamless process that requires little management from the staff.
Data Mapper Pattern: A CiviCRM Architecture Proposal
Current CiviCRM architecture pitfalls
rasantiago has proposed a new CiviCRM architecture with details of the ORM layer. Torenware commented on the latter and mentioned some particular scalability issues. Our own experience with the Active Record design pattern proposed by rasantiago is that it works well for small projects but doesn't scale well. We believe that CiviCRM is now facing serious scaling problems in several areas, to wit:
Better Household Management with CiviCRM
The current way to track Households (HH) in CiviCRM is not easy. Over the last few weeks DharmaTech has been brainstorming how to better manage HH's and we had a chance at the CiviCRM developer camp to bounce ideas off of the core team as well as other developers in the community which was really helpful. What follows are our ideas to start the discussion.






