Upcoming Events
NYC CiviCRM Meetup - September 7th
September 7th, 2010
This next NYC meetup will feature a case study or 2, a look at what's new in (more...)
Configuring, Customizing and Extending CiviCRM - New York
September 16th, 2010
This comprehensive two-day hands on training course is targeted at (more...)
CiviCRM User and Administrator Training - New York
September 16th, 2010
A comprehensive two day hands on training course covering the configuration, (more...)
CiviCRM Code and Test Sprint - New York
September 18th, 2010
This code and test sprint is targeted at experienced developers who want to (more...)
CiviCRM Toronto Meetup
September 21st, 2010
Come meet others from the Toronto Area who are interested in, using or (more...)
CiviCRM Philly Meetup – September 2010
September 23rd, 2010
Come meet others from the Philadelphia Area who are interested in, using or (more...)
CiviCRM Seminar - Dublin
September 28th, 2010
NfP Services are hosting a free seminar at The IBOA, Stephen St Upper, Dublin 8 (more...)
London developer and implementer training
September 30th, 2010
This comprehensive two-day hands on training course is targeted at implementers, (more...)
London user and administrator training
September 30th, 2010
A comprehensive two day hands on training course covering the configuration, (more...)
Berlin user and administrator training
October 6th, 2010
A comprehensive one day hands on training course covering the configuration, (more...)
Berlin developer and implementer training
October 7th, 2010
This comprehensive one-day hands on training course is targeted at implementers, (more...)
Benelux meetup in Brussels: Connect, communicate and activate your supporters and constituents
October 11th, 2010
Come meet others who are interested in, using or developing for CiviCRM. For (more...)
CiviCRM Toronto Meetup
October 19th, 2010
Come meet others from the Toronto Area who are interested in, using or (more...)
CiviCRM Toronto Meetup
November 16th, 2010
Come meet others from the Toronto Area who are interested in, using or (more...)
CiviCRM Components
Tools for engaging your supporters...
Expanding CiviCRM search ...
- 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.
We made a few major changes to the v1.7 search interface for a big improvement in performance. The first change was to ot use a wildcard for the prefix. Thus when a user searches on NAME, we only search for 'NAME%', in older version we would search for '%NAME%'. This allows mysql to use the index on sort_name and is significantly faster than a full table scan. The second change involved not searching the 'email' table when doing a search on 'name'. This allows us to avoid two very expensive 'LEFT JOIN' sql statement and speeds up search significantly.
You can get around the above limitations by manually specifying the prefix. There is also a new text search box for email in advanced search. This is probably not a very good user experience and the community has started bouncing around ideas on potential ways to improve the experience without sacrificing speed.
We also want a full text search engine for CiviCRM and some of my earlier thoughts are here. Based on a discussion on the mailing list, I decided to check out what are some technologies we could adopt in the near future into CiviCRM.
After a few minutes of searching, I found Solr. Solr is an XML based frontend sitting on top of Lucene. Solr communicates with the rest of the world using HTTP and XML. Thanx to some prior work, we pretty much have a most of the code for spitting out contacts as XML (we use this route to interface with PDFlib). I did go through the Solr tutorial and it seemed fairly easy to add / delete XML documents. Just need to do a bit more research on how to represent hierarchical tables and see the features it offers us.
I'm quite excited about this, and is with any new technology will probably spend some time over the next few days figuring out how best to integrate it with CiviCRM. I suspect this will give us a pretty good search solution for minimal effort. Both Solr and Lucene are java based projects so folks will need a J2EE server to get this functionality when we do introduce it. However this fits in nicely with the need for a J2EE server for the forthcoming release of CiviReport.
Some useful Lucene and Solr links:
Comments
Apache Solr Search for Civicrm 3
Hi,
I found the code for this for Civicrm 2.2.9 and before: http://svn.civicrm.org/civicrm/tags/tarballs/2.2.9/tools/solr/.
Is there also code that can be used for Civicrm 3 and any more documentation on how to use it?
Thanks
Dependencies
Hi Lobo
This sounds great. One of the great aspects of CiviCRM is the speed at which you guys are building in new features.
From your blog I note that this often involves implementing other projects as part of CiviCRM. The downside of this is that it creates a bunch of dependencies to manage in order to ensure stability/security.
I would be interested in your thoughts on this issue and what the developers do to deal with the risk/maintenance issues created by adding these dependencies?
Thanks for the great project!
Dependencies ...
I think its a tradeoff between build vs reuse. At our current stage, it does help to reuse as much as possible especially with high quality open source pacakages. We spend a fair amount of time figuring out what packages we can use etc. Yes, this does increase the security burden on folks implementing and deploying CiviCRM and its dependencies.