We did manage to hit the code freeze and branch date of Feb 26th. v1.7 is now off and living in its own branch. If you are using svn to get the latest version of the code base, make sure you switch to the v1.7 branch (svn switch is a useful command)
Blog posts by lobo
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February 25, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRMFrom our friends at CivicActions comes the Draft Al Gore site using Drupal and CiviCRM. They use a pretty nifty thermometer module to track the amount of money coming in via CiviContribute.
February 24, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM
I recently cam across Givewell.net, a group that has recently stirred some activity in the non-profit blogosphere. For more information and details you should check out the Givewell blog.
They ask non-profits some specific questions and expect specific answers. Being a non-profit and an open source organization, I figured it would be a good exercise for us to answer those questions. Note that like most of my other blog entries, this is a quick unplanned writing exercise ...
February 22, 2007
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRMGood background reading for ACL's can be found in the Wikipedia entry
Permissioning is quite important in CRM systems. CiviCRM used Drupal's permissioning system and stretched it a fair amount till v1.6. It had two major disadvantages: One, our joomla users do not have access to the permissioning model. Two, the Drupal model did not scale very well from a user interface perspective. This was primarily because it displayed all the permissions as a grid. If you had 300 roles and 300 smart groups, drupal displayed a table with 90,000 checkboxes. The browser would definitely not be happy with this chunk of HTML
February 21, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM
Here is a tentative release schedule for v1.7. As in any software project, these dates are tentative and subject to delays. UPDATE: I've updated to our latest dates
February 18, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRMI just finished implementing some cool features for customizing CiviCRM look and feel in v1.7. As most of you'll are aware CiviCRM follows a pretty good modular MVC (model-view-controller) architecture. We seperate the view (Smarty templates) from the code and business logic quite stringently and most of the display can be customized at the template level.
February 17, 2007
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRMI've spent a fair amount of the weekend attempting to install FishEye from Cenqua. Its awesome that companies like Atlassian (wiki and issue tracking software) and Cenqua (coincidentally both these firms are Australian!) give away free licenses to open source projects like CiviCRM.
FishEye helps you analyze, search, share and monitor your source code repository (in our case svn). We've always wanted something a bit more fancy than what subversion offers out of the box (a vanilla http interface to the code). We also wanted better integration with JIRA and link issues to the appropriate revision of the code. FishEye promised to deliver on both these cases. We had also heard pretty good reviews of the product.
February 14, 2007
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRMAn interesting discussion spawned on the civicrm-dev list recently regarding our implementation of custom groups and fields. We have been super cautious about this and have advised people not to create more than 20 custom fields per object (contact, activity, group, relationship etc).
February 13, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRMSeems like for the 2008 elections quite a few of the grassroot political candidates in the US have chosen to use Drupal and CiviCRM. I suspect for the 2012 election, this combination will be the platform of choice for the main campaign sites also :)
Note that these campaign sites are not the official campaign sites. They are created and built by their supporters. Some of the campaigns using Drupal / CiviCRM are:
Vote Hillary Draft Obama Kucinich for PresidentFebruary 6, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRMIn the past few weeks we've seen the introduction of a couple of CiviCRM Application Service Providers (ASP's). This is indeed good news for the CiviCRM community and gives the smaller organization a more cost effective and simpler solution to manage and host their web site and data.
The first one out of the blocks was CivicSpace On Demand. CSOD offers Drupal 4.7, CiviCRM 1.5 along with a few other useful drupal modules including CCK and Views. The CiviCRM install comes with CiviMail, CiviContribute and CiviMember.
Peter Hirst a long time CiviCRM and CiviMail user and contributor announced OpenSocialSites.com a few weeks ago. OpenSocialSites.com is based on Drupal 5.1, CiviCRM 1.6 and can additional drupal modules can be installed per your needs. It also comes with the other CiviCRM components including CiviMail, CiviContribute and CiviMember. Peter is also offering Joomla + CiviCRM hosting which will serve our ever growing Joomla community needs quite nicely
