Last week Kurund, Michael, Mari, Xavier and I spent 2 days in the UK training camp and 1 day at the user camp. We had a great turnout at both camps with a 18 participants in the training camp and 8 participants in the user camp.

Training Camp

The training camp was held over two days. Similar to our other camps this was also in an unconference format. The topics were decided by the participants and we split the day up into 5 sessions on both the days. Some takeaways from the user meetup:

• The UK NGO's rely more on government funding than on donations.
• Reporting and managing gift aid is important. We sketched out an implementation and a custom report for this on the wiki. More code on this coming soon
• Folks were quite excited about CiviReport and the reporting framework.
• Quite a few discussions on effectively supporting multi-org installations (n drupal installs, 1 shared civicrm db)
• A good discussion on how to make CiviCRM get around the "not built for UK (insert your favorite country here)" discussion. At some point in the future we should set better defaults given the installation country rather than only one set of defaults worldwide.
• How to extend and modify CiviCRM via hooks was a popular topic. We definitely need to post more examples and add even more support for this in future versions.
  

The Craigslist Foundation held their annual Non-profit Bootcamp this Saturday in Berkeley. This event brings together more than 1,500 people who are "passionate about changing the world". The opening keynote speaker was Arianna Huffington - who shared some wonderful stories about the importance of volunteering in improving our own lives along with the lives of folks we're helping.

I had the opportunity to participate in a panel on "Future Tech", along with Peter Deitz from Social Actions, Rayma Raghavan from YouTube, and Marnie Webb from Techsoup / NetSquared. Their was a nice turnout for the session (maybe 125+ folks). My goal was to get the audience excited about investigating open source tools by explaining the benefits of the open source model and the alignment between open source development and non-profit process and values. Of course I also spread the word about CiviCRM and some of the cool implementations folks are doing.

You can download my presentation slides from our wiki. Feel free to re-use, re-mix etc. :-) You can also read some more about our session, as well as some of the other happenings at the boot camp on Beth Kanter's blog.

I have two kids who started school late last year in San Francisco. I've been getting more involved with the school and their education and have been noticing the lack of open source software in most of the school operations. In the great open source tradition of scratching your own itch, this summer i'm looking at building a few modules. These seem applicable to a lot of schools and figured it might make more sense to do some research into whats available out there.

To clarify some terminology:

CMS - Content Management System like Drupal or Joomla
CRM - Contact / Constituent Relationship Management System like CiviCRM
SIS - Student Information System like SchoolTool or Open Admin
LMS - Learning Management System like Moodle

Parts of this post have been extracted from the discussion Drupal/CiviCRM as a SIS (student information system). I also chatted with Tom Hoffman about SchoolTool and SIS on the schooltool irc channel.

Over the past few releases we've been drinking a fair amount of the hook kool-aid. This has proven to be super effective and gets around the problem of hacking the core files, but still allow a developer to extend the functionality of the system in minor/major ways. We've used hooks also to implement event discounts and contribution/event tracking.

This week on IRC we had a few more questions which were effectively solved using hooks.

How do you delete a contact when a drupal user is deleted

Tom (http://www.kirkdesigns.co.uk/) wanted to delete the civicrm contact if the drupal user was deleted. The solution was to implement hook_user that gets called before civicrm's hook_user (you can do this by ensuring that your module has a lower weight than civicrm.module). Use the api call civicrm_uf_id_get to get the contact id for a given drupal user id. This is followed by an api call to civicrm_contact_delete to delete the contact.

On Thursday, June 4 2009 we had a CiviCRM meetup in NY. We set up this event via CiviEvent a couple of weeks prior to the event. Cynthia T managed to get us a room at the American Friends Service Committee building near Union Square. We filled up the 28 open slots for the event fairly quickly. We had a pretty good mixture of people. From experienced users to a folks who were just getting started with CiviCRM and wanted to learn more. There was also a large group of folks from different food cooperatives who were interested in using CiviCRM to manage the coop.

We started off with a round of introductions (name, organization, CiviCRM user, main thing you want to get from the meeting). Since this was our first meetup, it enabled us to get an idea of where folks were coming from. Following this was a presentation by Alice Aguilar from Progressive Technology Project on PowerBase and the reasoning behind using CiviCRM. This was followed by an extended Q&A session across a variety of topics. Some of the questions were: Drupal vs Joomla (the room had an approx 70% Drupal - 30% Joomla breakdown), 2.3 features and schedule, how things make it into core, usability, CCK integration and how the community can help / contribute code / patches to the project.

On a daily basis, we get quite a few interesting bugs / feature requests either via the IRC Channel or via the forums.

We figured that blogging about these requests will be of general interest (inspired by Acquia's S-Files blog). Here are a couple of things that have come up the past few weeks.

• IRC user proverse (David H) reported some strange interaction between export, contact View/Edit and the caching system. I spent a fair amount of time logged onto his system and tracing the behavior. It finally came down to over-running a mysql database 'text' field (in civicrm_cache) table. Along the way i also hardened some of the export code. You can track the issue and patches CRM-4571. A similar issue bit us in the past, when mailing text/html was limited to the size of the 'text' sql type (64KB). The framework needs to get a bit smarter on db field sizes and throw an exception if we exceed the length. This slows down every db write access, but also makes the code significantly stronger. Definitely hope to get this feature into 3.0.
• Earlier last week, lcdweb (Brian S) wanted to start using joomla hooks in his client implementations. While we've done quite a bit of hook development and implementation with Drupal, we had not gotten them working with Joomla/Standalone. We took this opportunity to flush out the last few details and get hooks working with Joomla. We are quite confident that the same protocol will work for Standalone. You can read more details on the issue here: Enable Joomla / Standalone to use the mighty power of hooks
  

We are looking for folks who can help us out at the following events. Both these events are in the San Francisco Bay Area

• Drupal Camp San Francisco - June 6th: We have attended prior badcamps and the sessions have been well attended. Depending on your skills and knowledge you could potentially do an Introduction to CiviCRM or Advanced CiviCRM or Modules that effectively use Drupal and CiviCRM (Views2, civicrm_member_roles etc). We can help you out over phone/email prior to the event. We are not in the Bay Area that weekend :(
• OSCON 2009, July 20 - 24, 2009: OSCON (open source conference) is the premier open source conference and is being held at the San Jose Convention Center. We can potentially get a free booth and table to exhibit and demo CiviCRM. We need someone willing to coordinate the logistics and recruit volunteers to man the booth. The other alternative could be to share a booth with another project (Drupal, Joomla)

If you can help out at either of the above events, please let me know (lobo at yahoo dot com). CiviCRM is at a stage now where getting broader exposure will benefit the product and the community. Please consider helping out

This release has been superceded by release 2.2.5 due to a critical bug in the Event Registration process. If you have downloaded this release, please replace it with 2.2.5.

 
The team has released version 2.2.4 with approximately 30 bug fixes and improvements. Notable fixes and improvements include:

• Discount Support for Online Event Registration using hooks (more)
• Enable Joomla / Standalone to use the mighty power of hooks

You can review a complete list of 2.2.4 changes on the issue tracker.

Trellon has been working on a fairly large implementation of CiviCRM for an advocacy group based in DC that was seeking to implement a CRM system that will help them manage their online fundraising and email marketing program. Email marketing is a large part of the organization's outreach strategy, so having a mail system that can deliver their 50,000+ emails in a short amount of time was a necessity.

The CiviCRM events calendar seems to be getting quite crowded. Here are some upcoming events in the next few weeks:

• Wed May 27, 6:00 - 8:00 pm: CiviCRM meetup in Washington DC.
• Mon June 1, 6:00 - 8:00 pm: CiviCRM meetup in San Francisco
• Thu June 4, 6:00 - 8:00 pm: CiviCRM meetup in New York.
• June 23 - June 24: CiviCRM training camp in London, UK (paid event).