We have been looking at whether it is a good idea to use households and thought I would pull together the various things that have been written about households into a bit of a 'where are they at'.

When working in setting up and developing websites (among other things) we often have to choose between getting stuck in and getting stuff done the known way or trying to invest time in coming up with a more automated way or efficient way of doing things. Usually at some point we become aware of whether we made the right choice – and I find that moment is normally accompanied by a certain sinking feeling.

So, amongst all the discussion of import methods lately I just wanted to flag another possible approach - creating a CiviCRM hook module for the Drupal migrate module

There are a bunch of great blogs out there on how to use the table wizard module with the migrate module to import data from various mysql tables or views into Drupal nodes / users / taxonomies / content types - for example:

http://www.lullabot.com/articles/drupal-data-imports-migrate-and-table-wizard

The migrate module has a bunch of hooks to allow you to use it for other forms of migrations. I rattled up the module / code pasted at the end of this blog in a couple of hours as a proof of content for using this approach to CiviCRM imports. The code I threw together just offers up civicrm_contact table fields but I think there must be some clever ways to use existing import tools rather than this rudimentary approach.

A while ago I mentioned that I was finding the backup and migrate module a better option to syncing Civi installs that the Civi drush command and Lobo asked if I would do a write-up on it.

I'm going to keep this pretty brief but I think it is worth telling people about as I find it really quick & easy.

http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate (AKA BAM)

Recently someone asked about setting up an autocomplete in a profile where the person completing the form would be offered the name of existing organisations in the database.

We have implemented this with a couple of different variations and I did promise to provide some information on this so here goes. I’ll try to explain a whole lot of ‘customising civicrm’ concepts but this isn’t a step-by-step recipe you’ll have to add a fair bit of technical know-how/ extra reading to flesh this out for your own purposes. I have added a recipe-type summary at the end just to sum up. Areas I will touch on are:

• Customising a template
• creating an autofill
• REST calls & the API
• Permissions & autofills/ API calls
• creating an autofill using my custom API
• Adding a ‘menu item’ (url) using a module (Drupal)
• Quicksteps

This is really a continuation of previous blogs on CiviCRM accounting integration. I now have some basic integration bewteen CiviCRM and Xero working and decided to do a screencast.

Screencasts are hardly my preferred medium - especially now that I've tried to make one but I thought it might be useful for people to see what a CiviCRM integration with the accounting package Xero would look like. The screencast doesn't show you any CiviCRM - just Xero and is more intended to give people an idea of what the day-to-day reality of it is.

A while back I wrote a forum post on how CiviGrant could be usefully extended to fulfill a wider function. I have just received a message from someone (datakid) who is prepared to put some time into extending it for his purposes which are explained here so I thought it might be worth soliciting people's thoughts and ideas.

I wasn't really sure when I wrote my first blog on accounts and CiviCRM whether it was a topic that would draw much interest but in fact I got a lot of really thoughtful comments and something of a blogathon took place. I have some ambition to write another piece summing up what I think has come out of the discussion - but in the meantime I want to pick up now on something Dave & I have talked about a little bit on the forums: invoice numbers.

This is my second blog on the topic of integrating with CiviCRM with an accounting system. Those of you who haven't just run screaming from the room or suddenly discovered an urgent need to polish the inside of your car exhaust, re-organise your tupperware or push needles into your eyes ... read on.

One of the areas that occasionally hits the forums is whether CiviCRM integrates with accounting systems. I've been giving a little thought to accounts integration lately and have now spent a bit of time poking around the Xero API and thinking about what I would do if I were to spent time trying to get CiviCRM talking to Xero. The content of this blog is mostly non-technical so if you can safely ignore the stuff about APIs if it doesn't mean anything to you.