Blog posts by Eileen

I seem to spend a large amount of time helping people to get data back out of CiviCRM. I'm a big fan of the reports framework and up until 4.2  I made a number of improvements to the core reports for my customers. However, from 4.2 I switched to doing reports in an extension. I have been doing almost all my reports in the extended reports extension and have been playing with a few ideas in that extension. Some of them are well developed, others are in the early stages.

A few months Back John Derry from The Monthly Magazine wrote a blog about how they were planning to use CiviCRM for magazine subscriptions.

Slow pages are annoying and they can cost $$$. But improving performance often means re-writing chunks of code and is often expensive. Bad performance hurts us all. So the question is how can we improve it.

The main mechanism we have used in the community so far for banding together to fund these things is the MIH - the tricky thing for performance is framing the MIH in a useful way.

Chris Ward has organised a meetup in Melbourne for this Monday:

Report back from CiviCon and a code-sprintette

Monday, April 23, 2012 6:00 PM

Inspire9 1/41 Stewart Street Richmond

Yesterday was CiviCon in San Francisco. I made it to CiviCon in London last year but this was my first US CiviCon. The gathering was even bigger this year with about 130 people and 4 concurrent sessions running throughout the day. It was great to see such an enthusiastic bunch of people and to catch-up with old friends and put a face to online connections. The venue was brimming with the open honest enthusiasm which seems to be part of the North-American culture.

Last week I wrote a blog about technical debt (comparing it to keeping a kitchen in order). I got a lot of feedback - most of it constructive. I'm going to resist belabouring the whole metaphor & limit this blog to a quick summary of some of the discussion that came out of it.

Do you like to whinge about CiviCRM code? Have you sat through others doing having a rant? I've certainly done both. Being in the drupal world people often like to compare CiviCRM code with drupal & CiviCRM usually comes up a bit short. I think that's like comparing my kitchen with Bill Gate's kitchen. There are a few good reasons why my kitchen is not as nice as his.

Although the API changes in 4.1 are not as obvious as took place in 3.4/4.0 there have been quite a few changes under the hood. This is a fairly detailed explanation of what's going on inside the API wrapper.

This month we did a fairly complex migration for a customer of about 90,000 contacts to CiviCRM. I have been using Migrate module to do migrations for a while now but this time for the first time I used version 2 of the migrate module. I put up a how-to-blog on our site just before Christmans but Fen has inspired me to get on with sharing it more widely.

As many of you know with 3.4 & 4.0 a new API came out (APIv3). The new API had a number of improvements over the previous v2 including