There was a thread in the forum a few weeks ago about adding generic replacements for tokens that dont have a value for a specific contact. An example is where the first name field is blank and the organization would want to substitute friend or member instead of keeping it blank. The token engine does not provide this functionality by default, however implementing it via a hook is relatively trivial.

The team has released version 2.2.9 today with around 13 bug fixes and improvements. Critical fixes include:

• Migration to a new host
• Standalone deadlocks with secure URLs
• Free event confirmation email

You can review a complete list of 2.2.9 changes on the issue tracker.

Download

I continue my work on deploying CiviCRM for my kids school. In previous blog posts i documented how to use hooks and custom templates to schedule parent teacher conferences and extended care activities and how to expose relationship information in a profile view. In this blog post I'll describe some more advanced features. I'll also describe the code and directory structure.

New Code Structure and Directory Layout

I've been working on customizing CiviCRM for my kids school. I documented how i exposed relationship information on a profile view in this blog post. In the past week i've also exposed "activities" and "a multiple record custom group" via profiles which i'll describe in this blog post. All this work was done via civicrm hooks and custom templates and run on CiviCRM v2.2.8. You can download the code from here. In this blog post i'll discuss two features that i've implemented: Scheduling Parent Teacher Conferences and Managing Extended Care.

Scheduling Parent Teacher Conferences

The school wanted an automated system to schedule parent teacher conferences. These meetings typically last 30 mins. For some grades its all done in one day, for some other classes its spread out over a couple of weeks (few slots / day). I decided to create a new activity type called "Parent Teacher Conference". For the first parent teacher conference, we have 4 advisors and 30 students. The conferences happen on the same day between 7:00 am - 6:00 pm. Each advisor has 10 students. Some students have 2 advisors. I wrote a script to populate these activities automatically with the assignee being the advisor. The advisor also has the option of going into his activities tab and deleting all the times when she/he does not want a meeting. We also created a new relationship type called "Advisor <-> Advisee" and used import to create these relationships.

The team has released version 2.2.8 today. This release includes an important security update for sites which use CiviCRM Profiles to collect and / or share contact data. We recommend that all sites install this upgrade as soon as possible. Details here:

• Affects Joomla! sites only
• Affects all sites using Profiles

2.2.8 also includes fixes for IE8 compatibility, some improvements in Views2 integration and approximately 30 other minor bug fixes. You can review a complete list of 2.2.8 changes on the issue tracker. Note that the IE8 fix causes the browser to run in IE7 compatibility mode for all CiviCRM pages.

I'm working on deploying CiviCRM for my kids school website. Part of the project requires us to expose the parent <-> child relationship information on the website and allow parents to edit their child information.

I accomplished this using a combination of civicrm hooks, custom templates, permissioned relationships and custom code in a drupal module. You can access the module and template code here.

The broad steps are:

• Implement hook_civicrm_pageRun for the profile view page (CRM_Profile_Page_Dynamic). Only implement this hook for the specific profile id's you want relationship information. In this case we have two profiles, a Parent Profile (gid=3) and a Student Profile (gid=4)
• The pageRun hook also adds the module's template directory to the smarty include path, so we dont have to set it globally. This also allow multiple modules to append different template directories to the template include path (check the function _sfschool_initialize)
• The hook gets either the parent or the child information using a custom query. We ensure that only permissioned parents can see their child information (in case of some complicated family structures). The queries are relatively simple at this stage, i suspect they will increase in complexity over the next few weeks
• The hook exposes the information gathered from the database to the smarty template
• The custom template (templates/CRM/Profile/Page/3/Dynamic.tpl) uses that information to display the relationship data on the page. I also edited the View.tpl template to eliminate the "Back to Listings" link.

My name is Jamie and I'm a student of Physics with Philosophy at the University of Manchester. I used to work with a bunch of people on a community-based church website. Recently we've been employed by a Thai Boxing company to build a community-based website as the hub of the various things this company will try and achieve. (So yes, currently we don't work with non-profits!). Currently its just a CMS but the community side of things will come (hopefully)

Version 2.2.7 was released today with CiviReport ("the return") phase 1. This version includes fourteen report templates with coverage for contact data, activities, contributions, events and memberships. Folks in the community who have had a chance to preview the functionality have been quite excited - and we think this is a significant step forward for CiviCRM.

First, a few concepts... CiviReport is delivered with a set of report templates. Each template covers a general reporting area - for example: Donor Report (Summary), LYBUNT (Last Year but not this Year), etc. Administrators can then create one or more report instances from a template - with specific display columns, filters and grouping rules. Users go to the CiviReport menu to see a list of report instances, and run the reports.
 

The team has released version 2.2.7 today. This release includes an important security update - and we recommend that you upgrade sites to this release as soon as possible.

2.2.7 also includes phase 1 of CiviReport - with 14 built-in report templates with coverage of contact data, contributions, events and memberships. Stay tuned for a separate blog post with lots more details on the new reporting features.

The team has released version 2.2.6 with approximately 35 bug fixes and improvements. Notable fixes and improvements include:

• More CiviCRM - Views2 integration/fixes
• Renew Membership fixes ( CRM-4555,CRM-4556 )

You can review a complete list of 2.2.6 changes on the issue tracker.

Download

You can download CiviCRM 2.2.6 at our download page. Select from the civicrm-stable section. The filenames include the 2.2.6 label: civicrm-2.2.…. Be sure and download the correct version for your CMS (Drupal / Joomla! / Standalone).