Blog posts by DaveD

Thanks to some work by MGlaman and KarinG and others, some integration with the Mink/Behat front-end testing framework is now available for you to use to write automated tests. Does it replace regular phpunit? No, you should still write regular tests too. But let's take a look at what it can add.

CiviCRM has patches that it needs to apply to 3rd party libraries. Composer has a plugin to apply those patches for you. Simple, right?

By now anyone who has tried to install CiviCRM on Drupal 8 has met Composer. You need to update its configuration to make patches work.

Credit goes to other people but I wanted to point out a new setting now available as of 5.17.0 that should speed up most sites. At worst it should have no effect. It's like that button on traffic light poles - you press it and sometimes it does nothing but sometimes the light changes faster. Either way you're no worse off, except they now have your fingerprints on file.

If you don't know about the email processor, briefly it's a way to file emails into CiviCRM as activities, and less briefly, see http://book.civicrm.org/user/current/advanced-configuration/email-system-configuration (about half way down).

One of the items we didn't get to at the code sprint was a quicksearch by id that bypasses search results pages and takes you directly to the page in question, e.g. a case id or a contribution/invoice id.

On a system with roughly 25,000 activities, running on a dedicated server, the case dashboard would take over a minute to load. Other orgs have reported similar problems, and in at least two cases the consultants simply removed the upcoming/recent sections from the dashboard since it was just too slow.

Taking for example the upcoming section, on the server above the query would take about 26 seconds. With some optimization, it now takes less than 1 second.

We had a good discussion that came up because we were discussing a change being made to lower the barriers that currently exist for evaluators of CiviCase. We thought it would be good to write down some things:

As it is well-known, you can never have too many Dave's, so we've gathered three of the four Dave's here (Dave G, Dave J, and Dave D) along with some nice and smart people not named Dave (Tim O, Yashoda), and are working towards incorporating some community feedback into CiviCase. A list of improvements we're currently working on here at the sprint includes:

The Physician Health Program of BC has a task that goes something like this: Their vendors, and even staff and board members, are not paid directly by them but by the provincial medical association (BCMA), so when invoices from vendors come in, they need to enter the information onto a special form and send that off to the BCMA for payment. Then they periodically send back a statement to reconcile against.