Earlier this month Evan posted a query about a CiviCRM AMI for Amazon EC2. Joe Murray responded with some proof of concept scripts along with the persistent storage space limitations in EC2. Seems like the folks at EC2 have been busy addressing these limitations and have introduced persistent storage support for EC2 (its currently in beta).
Blog posts by lobo
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May 20, 2008
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM, TeamsMost of you are probably aware that CiviCRM is developed and maintained by a team of dedicated developers spread around the world (India, Poland, USA and New Zealand). We have had regular team meeting over IM / Skype the past couple of years on a weekly basis. We figured it might make sense to try holding the meeting in a public forum so more community folks can participate in the development and running of CiviCRM.
May 18, 2008
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM
So i've been looking a bit closely at performance for 2.1 (both database and usability) and am attempting to boost it up significantly compared to 2.0 (and prior). Here are some of the highlights
We've introduced a new database cache table (civicrm_cache) to cache a few database queries that are repeated a lot. Some of the specific queries include listing all the fields available for the contact types (individual/org/household). This is a combination of the built-in fields (name, address etc) and the custom fields added by the user. This reduces the number of queries invoked from 5 complex queries to 1 simple cache query (and an un-serialize)
We've added a column (group_type) to the profile table (civicrm_uf_group), so we know the profile type rather than recompute it every time we need it.
Thanx to Dave Lange who reported and did some analysis on this, we've reduced the number of LOWER( dbColumnName) LIKE 'value' to skip the LOWER part. Email is now stored as lower case, so we can skip the LOWER part in all email comparison. In his tests, these have improved performance a fair bit
Smart Groups
Hierarchical Select
Menu System
DeDupe
We will integrate the ACL changes into core either as a pluggable ACL architecture and/or via the hook system.
Overall 2.1 is shaping up to be a significant improvement over 2.0 :). You can get more details on the 2.1 feature set and release schedule on the CiviCRM v2.1 wiki page.
May 13, 2008
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM
One of the core features of CiviCRM is the ability to store a query as a group (smart group). This allows folks to create groups of contacts that share the same attribute(s). For e.g. A group of all the people in California. Thus contacts can be added/edited/deleted from the database, and the smart group will always give you all the contacts who live in CA at that point in time. I suspect this feature is heavily used by quite a few installs.
May 7, 2008
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRMToday we spent a fair amount of time with Pete and Chris from the NZ greens. We got a pretty good overview of how the NZ Greens are using the system and some of their pain points. We saw some of the cool integration that Chris has done with the NZ voter database and linking the electorate ID to a CiviCRM contact ID, ability to merge the address from the voter database etc. Its kinda cool how folks can extend and integrate the systems with other db's and we need to make it significantly easier to enable folks to build such system within CiviCRM.
April 30, 2008
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRMThe past few days we've been focussed on improving the user experience of CiviCRM. This also included optimizing page size and number of database queries invoked per page load. One of the things that has bothered me for some time was the inefficient implementation of the quickform hierarchical select widget for our case.
April 30, 2008
By lobo Filed under CiviCRMWe released CiviCRM v2.0.3. This issue addresses a few issues in upgrade and fixes approx 20 bugs. We do not maintain a CHANGELOG (i think we need to start doing this), but you can see the list of changes here:
http://biryani.osuosl.org:8181/changelog/CiviCRM/branches/v2.0
April 28, 2008
By loboFiled under A few members of the CiviCRM core team (dave, yashodha, michal and kurund) are visiting us in Nelson, NZ. We get together a couple of times a year which is quite helpful when we all return to various parts of the globe. This also gives the team a chance to visit and explore new places.
April 28, 2008
By lobo Filed under CiviCRMThe next NOSI/NTEN webinar will be on CiviCRM. The event is scheduled for April 29th, 11:00 am Pacific time. We'll be up bright and early and host this event from Nelson, NZ. We will give an overview of CiviCRM, examples of its use, and have lots of time for questions. Register on the NTEN Site. More details about the agenda can be found here.
April 18, 2008
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM, Drupal, Joomla
Drupal 6 introduced a new menu system. CiviCRM had modeled its menu system after drupal 4.x which meant we needed to upgrade the menu code significantly to upgrade CiviCRM to Drupal 6. We took the opportunity to learn and understand more from drupal's new system and also simplify the interface between CiviCRM and Drupal with regard to the menu hook.
The CiviCRM menu system has been based on the Drupal menu system, so all credit for the below goes to chx and the Drupal folks (all blame should be assigned to us). We have simplified and extended it a bit to meet our needs. Similar to Drupal menu system, the CiviCRM menu data now resides in the database. civicrm_menu stores all the information for a menu item.
