Blogues

The CiviCRM core team is currently meeting in San Francisco. We tend to meet 2-3 times a year. These meetings help us crank out a few large projects as a group and also help improve our communication when we return to our respective home bases.

Implementing support for multiple organizations with hierarchy is one of the main themes of the phase 2 part of the CiviCRM / The Public Interest Network (PIN) project. PIN has a fairly complex structure. It is a federation of organizations which include US PIRG, Environment America and others.

I’m happy to report a PHP counterpart to imap2soap is coming in CiviCRM 2.2, so the handling of CiviMail’s return channel should be much easier in the future (ideally as simple as setting up a cronjob).

There are also other CiviMail improvements and changes in 2.2 (kudos to U.S. PIRG for their sponsorship!) which I plan to unveil in upcoming post(s), but let’s concentrate on the return channel for now.

Lately there has been lot of confusion using Name, Title/Label and Value. There is also a lot of inconsistency in code and database, hence we are planning to fix it in CiviCRM v2.x release.

Lets take an example of Participant Status, 'Registered'. In this case Name will be 'Registered', value will be an integer from 1..N (this depends on each install) and Label/title can be "Registered" or "I will come" etc. (or a localized version of the word/phrase).

Basic rules are:

The API was a big topic at CiviCamp. We had a good discussion on the mistakes we made in the past and things we can do better going forward. Due to a variety of reasons (internal and external), the API migration between 1.9 and 2.0 was a disaster. We resolved to not let this happen in the future. Here are a few things we agreed upon

We coded / migrated / bugfixed a few drupal modules as part of CiviCamp (blog reports here and here). We also decided to ship these modules with our 2.1 release. You can get the current version of these modules here. CiviCRM v2.1.2 will include the following drupal integration modules:

Today was the second (and, unfortunately, last) day of the SF CiviCamp.

The day started with Rob Thorne’s presentation on using CiviCRM 1.x contacts as CCK fields and his work on CiviNode. Given that in the meantime all of CiviCRM, CCK and Views released version 2s, the outcome of the discussion was that it’s best to rewrite this code from scratch.

CiviCRM team members had the opportunity to attend the BADCamp Oct. (11/12) held in University of California, Berkley. We decided to sit through the lectures of our respective interests.