Blog posts by lobo

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August 28, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM

We've had captcha support for some time in CiviCRM. This is not a very popular feature since getting it to work properly is not trivial (you need the right PHP libraries and the path to the a ttf font on your server)

This post by Gordon Heydon, pushed me to investigate ReCAPTCHA, which has a cool tagline: Stop Spam, Read Books. I've seen a few sites in the recent past that have been powered by ReCAPTCHA.

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August 27, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM

We need someone who has used and is familiar with CiviCRM to give an introduction to CiviCRM at Drupal Camp LA. The forum post from the camp organizer is here.

From the forum post:

Looking for a CiviCRM speaker for DrupalCampLA on Sept 8 & 9th, 2007. There are many Drupal users who avoid using CiviCRM because of the perceived learning curve. If you can lead a discussion on CiviCRM for DrupalCampLA, please sign-up at http://barcamp.org/DrupalCampLASessions.

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August 23, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM
CiviMail has been a component within CiviCRM since early on (v1.2 or so). However the technical hurdles to install and get CiviMail up and running are quite high and hence CiviMail did not get as much attention or user base as CiviCRM and the other components. CiviMail is an integral part of any medium-large size install and is used by a few organizations successfully. For the average user, a few things have changed in the recent past which I suspect will increase the popularity of CiviMail. Some of these changes are:
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August 19, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM

The last few weeks of a release is always quite frustrating. The team is itching to get started with new development and get on with the next version. However, users are testing the beta release and filing new issues and bugs, few tweaks need to be done etc. So overall, things are in a neither here nor there status. However, once we mark a release as stable, we move most of the development team onto the new release and things get more exciting.

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August 12, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM

Here are a few drupal modules built and maintained by the community that seem quite useful. Thanks to all the folks who have spent time and energy maintaining and releasing these modules. Note that most of the project descriptions have been lifted from the project page on Drupal. If you have questions or bugs related to the below modules, please file them on the issue page of each module.

CiviCRM Subscribe: Allows users to subscribe (double opt-in) to a CiviCRM group without creating a Drupal user.
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August 7, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM

I got tired of waiting for someone to build an installer. So last weekend I decided to just do it. My original plan was to copy and modify the Joomla installer. I took a look at the code and it seemed to be quite well structured and modular. However it included a fair amount of code from Joomla itself and hence was quite big.

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August 7, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM
The Drupal Association is rolling out its membership package. They are using CiviCRM and CiviMember to manage their members. You can get more details, join the association and become a member here. We do think that supporting open source projects is very important and essential to the health and well being of the project. Please do consider joining the association

From their introductory page:

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August 4, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM

Kieran Lal from CivicSpace on Demand has made 1.8 Beta along with Drupal 5.2 available for free (mailing limit restrictions apply) on the CSOD web server. This is good news indeed and helps folks evaluate Drupal 5.2 and CiviCRM 1.8 without the install hassles. For more details you can read Kieran's post on the CiviCRM forums at:

CiviCRM 1.8 Beta sites on CivicSpaceOnDemand available for free

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August 1, 2007
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM

Wes Morgan and the team at Code for change have decided to tackle something that is fairly important to quite a few medium - large sized organizations. Having support for this in CiviCRM would be really cool and we need your comments and feedback fairly quickly. Wes and team move at a very rapid pace, so please head over to the wiki page and give them and us feedback on the model and implementation.

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July 30, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM

We are starting to run against a few java issues on our FreeBSD platform. Our current hosting provider, Electric Embers, only supports FreeBSD. Hence we need to find a new hosting provider.

Here are our requirements:

Two dedicated Ubuntu servers which mirror each other for backup purposes LAMP stack + java stack We do need root access and control over the boxes. We are fine doing software upgrades Provider should provide hardware monitoring and offsite backups. Support for software process monitoring would be great
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