Blog posts by lobo

A few of us have started exploring how we can integrate Doctrine into future versions of CiviCRM. A large part of this work was initiated by Peter Haight from Giant Rabbit who explained his thinking and approach in this blog post on Persistence Refactoring. One of our goals for the next few releases of CiviCRM is to improve the technology backbone that Civi is based on. It made sense to most of us to start from the database layer and then move outwards and using doctrine and working with peter seemed a good logical next step.

We decided to spend 3 weeks (till mid january) on various exploratory sprints and try and answer a few questions and see how things are done in the doctrine/symfony world of things. We also decided to start adopting more scrum - like technques and iterate on a weekly basis. Our goal is to come up with a list of things that we are curious about going forward and work on some potential answers during the week. So without further ado, here are some of the things that we decided to investigate and research this week:

At CiviCon, Gunner from Aspiration Tech facilitated a session with the entire community soliciting feedback, discussion and comments on the project. It was a good opportunity for everyone to give feedback on the state of the project, things that we are doing a good job with, and things that we can improve. We ended up doing a collaborative grouping of the feedback in various categories and sorting the comments.

Some of the positives that are worth highlighting include:

We had our 4th CiviCon in San Francisco a few days back. It was a very well attended event with very high quality sessions. We hope to have most of the videos online in the next few weeks. I'm quite keen on watching all the sessions that I had to miss. There were lots of highlights for me personally during this event, i'll make an attempt to recreate some of them here:

CiviCRM had a very successful year in 2011. The project grew significantly in different areas and we made progress on a few long standing issues. The biggest change in our opinion is the increase in community involvement across all aspects of the project.

The CiviCRM team invites you to CiviCon 2012

CiviCon – the annual conference for CiviCRM developers, implementers, administrators and users – is happening in the San Francisco Bay Area on April 2nd. Early bird registration is just $75 and ends less than a month away on January 30th, so reserve your spot now.

Continuing our amazing productivity during sprints, we introduce our 9th and final sprint of the year. This sprint is being held at the offices of De Goede Woning in Netherlands from Dec 12th - Dec 16th.

We've been having a great gathering and an incredibly productive code sprint at wonderful Cawthorpe, UK. Thanx to Dave Moreton from Circle Interactive for organizing the logistics and making this event possible.

Over the past few weeks, at least 6 people have asked a very similar question on the forums. I want to extend the results from the Contact / Contribute / Member search form and display these fields instead of my least favorite fields. For example, users want to see the organization and job title of their contacts in the search form instead of country and post code. Or the total amount someone has contributed to the organization as part of the contribution search results. We had a few ways of doing this, but not very elegant.

I wanted to address and solve this during the code sprint. I looked at the code and initially came up with two hooks: one for the search headers and one for the search results. In a conversation with Kurund, we figured that one hook was a lot easier for downstream developers. I took a closer look and found an even better place to introduce the new hook: hook_civicrm_searchColumns. This will be part of 3.4.6

Basically, in the hook you modify the headers and values and inject / modify both the arrays as you see fit. The search templates currently are hard-wired to what it is going to display. So in some cases you might need to customize the search template also. You can work around this if you are keeping the same columns and overwriting the values in the array.

In the past three weeks, we worked with a client to build scheduled email reminders for activities in CiviCRM. Detailed project specifications are on the wiki at ARMS Project Home. We've added the following new features to CiviCRM as part of this work:

On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week we had the a CiviCRM Code Sprint in San Francisco.