San Francisco Developer Camp Report

We had a CiviCRM developer Camp on April 29th and 30th at Mitchell Kapor Foundation in downtown San Francisco. This was our largest developer camp with approx 25 attendees and 6 folks from the core team (Dave, Kurund, Deepak, Michal, Yashodha and me). This event was slightly different from our past developer camps. Due to the confluence of various events (Penguin Day, NTEN, Book Sprint) we had a great collection of users and integrators with indepth CiviCRM experience. We chose this opportunity to have them speak on some of their past work related to CiviCRM.

• Wes Morgan from US Public Interest Network led sessions on the current API and the future direction of the API. The discussion is still happening on the API and Hooks forum topic
• Dave D from the Physician Health Program - British Columbia gave a demo of CiviCase and the model / assumptions behind it. A lot of folks commented on how close it is to a project management tool
• Walt Haas from Dharmatech gave an introduction to the what/why/how of unit testing and why it is crucial to the future of CiviCRM. Dharmatech stepped up and made a proposal of what should be done for 2.3 to put CiviCRM on the unit testing train to success
• Roberto Santiago from raSantiago and associates demoed a cool implementation which integrates ModX as the CMS front-end, Ruby on Rails as the middleware and CiviCRM as the backend for a soon to be launched site. Roberto also explained about the work they have done with Amazon EC2, MySQL databases on the cloud and backup and recovery. Sounds quite interesting and potentially a way forward for a affordable CiviCRM ASP
• Peter Davis from Fuzion gave an overview of some of the work they have done for the Green Party of NZ and other clients.

We split each day into 4 chunks of 1.5 - 2 hours each. We had one of the above talks in the morning and another in the afternoon. The rest of the time we split the group into 4-6 smaller groups, each focusing on a different area of interest. Some of these sessions were

• Overview of whats new and coming in 2.3. We previewed the navigation and usability changes, along with the contact edit form changes. We also introduced CiviReport and demoed the Views2 integration
• CiviCRM Code Architecture, Schema and Layout
• Writing drupal modules that integrate with CiviCRM. Using CiviCRM hooks effectively without hacking core
• CiviCRM API's: The past, present and future
• Access control lists and how you silo data for orgs with large data sets and multiple hierarchical chapters. Folks described their use cases and most of them resembled the Green Party of NZ model that we can solve efficiently using ACL hooks
• CiviReport: We started work on two new reports, a Repeat Donation Summary and Detail Report with specifications from the Wikimedia foundation and a Walk List Report with specifications from the Progressive Technology Project.
• CiviEvent: Usability, new features coming in 2.3 (waitlist, approval, add additional information for participants) and ability to create new events from pre-defined templates

We'll get more detailed reports on some of the above sessions in future blog posts. You can also read Michelle Murrain's blog post on Day One here