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Xavier Dutoit

Developer and Implementor

Tech to the People

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Over the past 15 years I've been involved in several open source communities.
CiviCRM is without any doubt the one that has the strongest focus in welcoming "newbies" and letting everyone feel at home here. Another impressive feature is the focus on shipping. No matter what you think of CiviCRM today, you are almost sure that there will be a newer and better version in a few months.
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Paul Keogan

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BackOfficeThinking

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CiviCRM allows us to bring all benefits and capabilities of a large commercial CRM and
donor management system to medium and large non-profits at a fraction of the cost. CiviCRM also allows smaller non-profits to benefit from an integrated solution for donor management, events, bulk email, etc. substantially increasing their effectiveness as compared to managing a variety of nonintegrated software and spreadsheets. Thanks to a strong CiviCRM community, CiviCRM’s functionality continues to advance and CiviCRM’s market continues to grow rapidly.
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Sarah Gladstone

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Pogstone, Inc.

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I have been involved in the CiviCRM community for over 4 years, and enjoy implementing and programming CiviCRM for a variety of non-profits. I have been amazed at the rapid pace of innovation delivered with each new release, and CiviCRM's flexibility in being able to accommodate a variety of requirements. I have learned a lot about CiviCRM by participating in CiviCon, online forums, and CiviCRM book sprint.
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Michael Daryabeygi

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Ginkgo Street Labs

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CiviCRM enables me to empower my clients with a database that suits their unique needs.
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Coleman Watts

End-user and Developer

Woolman Sierra Friends Center

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If it weren't for CiviCRM we'd be using at least 5 different
systems for Woolman: one for donor management, another for email newsletters, a third for our school enrollment, a fourth for our summer camp registration, and then a whole bunch of spreadsheets for keeping track of things like event attendance, prospective students, CSA memberships, etc. And of course none of those systems would talk to each other or make it possible to get a whole picture of the many ways one person might participate in our education center's activities. Migrating all of our scattered data and disparate systems to CiviCRM was a long and challenging process, but the results have been more than worth it. Our ability to track and report on our programs has improved dramatically, while the burden on staff to do data entry has been greatly reduced, and our participants are happy that they can now register/enroll online rather than mailing or faxing paper forms.
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Allen Gunn

Ally, FanBoy

Aspiration

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By giving the nonprofit sector a values-driven, free/open source solution for CRM needs!
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Michal Mach

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CiviCRM, Caltha

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I've always been passionate about what non-profits and advocacy groups can achieve using technology. For me, CiviCRM shows an essential example of how non-profit and technology worlds can come together to provide real change - working as community, creating value for yourself, but also for others in non-profit sector.
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Amy Bucaida

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Missouri Credit Union Association

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We are a full CiviCRM install with Drupal.
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Third Sector Design

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We work with non-profits to help them use and understand Civi. It's such an important tool for these organisations and it's great to see people using it in different and interesting ways. Using and working with Civi is made so much more fun and useful by the enthusiastic and talented community surrounding it.
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Ken West

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City Bible Forum

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City Bible Forum is an Australian not-for-profit Christian organisation. We need to communicate effectively with our constituents, and CiviCRM gives us a comprehensive set of tools for managing relationships. Interestingly, we often find that new features are being added just as our need for those features is becoming apparent. It's the right fit for us.
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Kurund Jalmi

Developer, Implementor

Web Access India Pvt. Ltd.

http://webaccessglobal.com

I have been part of CiviCRM project from the beginning and feels great to see how it has grown over the years.
I am glad to be associated with such a wonderful open source project and an awesome community around it.
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Tim Otten

DEVELOPER AND IMPLEMENTER

CiviCRM

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Home » Blogs » totten's blog

Experimenting with Activity Calendars

Submitted by totten on August 29, 2011 - 13:27

Several CiviCRM users have expressed an interest in managing CiviCRM activities with a smooth, interactive calendar screen.  Since calendaring can be a complex topic, we've put together a basic, working calendar to facilitate discussion.  The prototype resembles the calendar included in other relationship-management tools:

Calendar screenshot

The calendar is implemented in three pieces: (1) the excellent jquery-week-calendar plugin provides a rich Javascript interface for dragging and dropping calendar items, (2) arms_recur provides an API for creating recurring activities, and (3) example_calendar integrates these pieces into the CiviCRM interface.

If you think that a rich calendar interface would improve CiviCRM, then please give the prototype a spin and give some feedback.  What features make the most sense in a CiviCRM activity calendar?  What's good or bad about the prototype?  How should such a calendar interact with other calendaring tools -- do we need to reinvent Outlook or Google Calendar, or can we carve out a clear niche? What resources can you provide to help make this happen?
 

Limitations

As a proof-of-concept, the example_calendar isn't implemented to the same standards as much of CiviCRM, and deploying it requires PHP developer skills.  Notably, it has been tested with Drupal 6 using CiviCRM 2.2 and 3.4, but it hasn't been tested with any other configurations.  Additionally, the arms_recur module must install some MySQL triggers -- this only works correctly in certain configurations (e.g. MySQL 5.1 with a unified Drupal+CiviCRM database); if you have a different configuration, I can't help much, but you may be able to prepare the triggers yourself. (Read "function arms_recur_arms_trigger" in arms_recur.module.)
 

Instructions

1. Download and extract the modules example_calendar, arms_recur, and arms_util from http://code.locker10.com/
     export WEBROOT=/var/www/civi/drupal
     cd $WEBROOT/sites/all/modules/
     wget http://code.locker10.com/arms_util-latest.tar.gz
     wget http://code.locker10.com/arms_recur-latest.tar.gz
     wget http://code.locker10.com/example_calendar-latest.tar.gz
     tar xvzf arms_util-latest.tar.gz
     tar xvzf arms_recur-latest.tar.gz
     tar xvzf arms_calendar-latest.tar.gz
2. If you are working with a stable release of CiviCRM, then you probably need
   to update the images and CSS for the jQuery UI library. This can be done by:
     cd $WEBROOT/sites/all/modules/civicrm
     rsync -va $WEBROOT/sites/all/modules/example_calendar/lib/week-calendar/libs/css/smoothness/./ packages/jquery/css/./
     patch -p0 < $WEBROOT/sites/all/modules/example_calendar/civicrm.css.diff
3. Find the Drupal "files" directory and create a subdirectory called "arms_util" with can be read and written by PHP.
   For example:
      mkdir $WEBROOT/sites/default/files/arms_util
      chown www-data $WEBROOT/sites/default/files/arms_util
4. Activate the example_calendar module
5. Update the CiviCRM menu by visiting http://EXAMPLE.COM/civicrm/menu/rebuild?reset=1
6. In the CiviCRM menu, navigate to "Other -> Calendar"
7. In the upper-right corner of the calendar, click on the "settings" button
   and choose some filter options.
8. Use the calendar!

Comments

Submitted by malks on August 29, 2011 - 19:55

I had similar issues with a Civi install (and continue to have them with recurring activities which client is screaming for) and went down a similar path cobbling the excellent fullcalendar into something that could display both activities and events (in the screenshot, events are blue).

Other must have function included:

  • The ability to print out a calendar.
  • Different views (month/week/day)
  • Being able to see activities for "teams" (in mine, people with a role)

This tends to be a particular pain point if users have come from a desktop application (in this case Goldmine) or even if they have much familiarity with Google calendar.

Keep up the great work!

 

Submitted by malks on August 29, 2011 - 19:59

For some reason my image didn't attach.  At any rate will try out the prototype and tell you how I go.

Submitted by xavier on August 29, 2011 - 23:29

Is the code already uploaded somewhere or could you share it?

 

X+

Submitted by totten on August 31, 2011 - 09:07

fullcalendar looks like a great widget, and it seems more comprehensive than weekcalendar.

 

If you're having an issue with recurring activities, you should take a look at the arms_recur module. A few interesting things to note:

 * It supports scheduling based on day-of-week over a period of time. (e.g. "Every Tuesday and Thursday for the next two months")

 * It uses a mental model similar to Google calendar's for applying changes to "this one activity", "all activities in the same schedule", and "future activities in the same schedule".

 * There are fairly extensive unit-tests for things like enabling, disabling, and rescheduling activities.

 * There's a backwards compatibility mechanism (based on SQL triggers) which ensures that any pre-existing code (SQL/PHP/whatever) which manipulates activities will have a well-defined behavior (i.e. legacy code uses "this one activity" mode).

Submitted by xavier on September 1, 2011 - 02:46

Looks interesting, and sorry tim, seems that I prefer fullcalendar as the supporting widget ;)

 

Is this a module you developped? Could you share the code?

 

X+

Submitted by malks on September 4, 2011 - 22:16

Hi,

 

Was trying to get this up and running but couldn't find  Arms_actperm to install?

 

Malks.

Submitted by totten on September 5, 2011 - 16:42

It's not really a dependency, though -- it shouldn't even be referenced, except that I was too lazy to design a proper hook. It's referenced maybe twice in arms_recur.module, and they're both guarded references ("if (function_exists(...))...").

 

Anyway, the module works without it, so I've removed the dependency clause from arms_recur.info and put up a new tarball.

Submitted by malks on September 8, 2011 - 23:29

I downloaded the latest tarball but the reference in arms_recur.info was still there so not sure whether I've grabbed the right version (I just re-grabbed the file at http://code.locker10.com/arms_recur-latest.tar.gz).  At any rate I've manually removed the clause from arms_recur.info manually and the module enables.

 

Going to the calendar though draws the widget but it remains in a "Processing..." state.  Any ideas?  I'll jump in and have a look now.

 

Also the instructions reference example_calendar in the wget (http://code.locker10.com/example_calendar-latest.tar.gz) and arms_calendar-latest in the tar (arms_calendar-latest.tar.gz).  Which one is right.  I'd tried arms_calendar-latest, but will try example_calendar as well.

Submitted by malks on September 9, 2011 - 00:21

i.e. at <webroot>/admin/build/services should I see the services defined in the ARM module?