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.

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.

As the Summer of Code coding phase got rolling, I started looking at the tasks I listed in my original description of the project.

Being one of the CiviCRM developers for the past three years, the community/boding period in my case went pretty nicely. :) As part of my regular CiviCRM activities, through most of the past month I’ve been working on the new dedupe engine, and I’m really happy with the results – but it’s high time now to concentrate on my Summer of Code activities.

Based on the success of the previous trainings/boot camps, we’d like to schedule our first training on the US East Coast: July 23rd-24th in Philadelphia. We’d like to host people from three / four different organizations (around twelve participants) and conduct the sessions as a mix of advanced user training, developer training, design and coding, based on the interests of the attendees. We've built quite a few features and improved integration with Drupal / Joomla in prior trainings.

The training would be held at the Ethical Humanist Society of Philadelphia, 1906 South Rittenhouse Square (with lots of nice eating places nearby).

This would be a paid event – $1,000/person for the two days (none of us being from the East Coast, we need to cover our expenses). Please let us know (by mailing dave at civicrm dot org) if you are interested; we’d like to make the training definite in the coming week or two. We currently have a total of 4 paying folks signed up, so we need a couple more orgs to sign up if the training is to happen.

The new dedupe engine and UI landed on trunk (development part of our code repository) last week, and we’d be more than happy if you gave it a try on our CiviCRM 2.1 sandbox and let us know how it works for you.

The new dedupe, besides the engine changes described earlier, sports a new user interface. Navigate to Administer CiviCRM → Find and Merge Duplicate Contacts and check out the new admin screens.

As hinted previously, I’ve been working on dedupe improvements for CiviCRM 2.1. The first thing I wanted to handle is to move as much of the dedupe search from the PHP code to the database side.

I created a wiki page describing the plan; it would be great if any interested parties gave it a read and commented. Thanks!

CiviCRM is an open source constituent relationship management system used by NGOs and advocacy groups (like Amnesty International, Wikimedia Foundation or the Joomla!

Thanks to the wonderful people from Joomla! who took us under their Google Summer of Code umbrella and personal commitment from Wes Morgan, of Environment America (who will be mentoring on CiviCRM’s behalf), we’re very, very happy to announce that we have two student projects funded by Google this year!