CiviCRM at Altitude

Published
2016-02-22 10:55
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Most people going to Vail, CO go to ski. However, some come to work on making CiviCRM even better. High up in the Colorado Rocky Mountains ten people got together to squash bugs, work on CiviCRM for Drupal 8, enhance CiviCRM for WordPress, improve the payment processing tools, and update the end-user documentation. 

Everyone enjoyed themselves at the sprint.  Personally I had a lot of fun being with others who are passionate about making CiviCRM better.  The primary activities for everyone were working on CiviCRM projects but we also enjoyed great conversations and cooking for each other.  Some of the sprinters went skiing on the last day of the sprint.  

Sam Gazal, Virginie Ganivet and I (Steve Kessler) made progress working on documentation.  We worked on updating the CiviCRM book for CiviCRM 4.7. We also are working on making the book more consistent. There is still more to be done and if you are interested you can help by looking at documentation issues on JIRA and submitting pull requests on GitHub. JoAnne Chester in Australia and Robb Neumann in Denver helped with the sprint remotely. 

For those working on CiviCRM for Drupal 8 a lot of progress was made. Allen Shaw worked on making CiviCRM usable with Drupal 8. Using CiviCRM Buildkit you can now download and install CiviCRM and Drupal 8 (the alias is d8-master). The CiviCRM menu and dashboard now load with Drupal 8 making it possible to navigate in CiviCRM.

Nicolas Ganivet worked on making it simpler for new developers joining the CiviCRM community to get started. There is now a Github project with Vagrant allowing a simple download of a CiviCRM development environment on a local machine. When you download this image you can quickly get started with a virtual machine that has everything you need to start working on CiviCRM as a developer or for a technical review of the product. This will be very helpful for the upcoming sprint for getting every participant up to speed and on the same platform.

Kevin Cristiano worked on WordPress improvements.   He worked through the open issue queue reducing the number of WordPress issues to under 10.  He added patches to 4.7 and 4.6 that moved CiviCRM closer to removing all hard coded paths for the WordPress component.

Karin Gerritsen led the work on improving payment handling tools. Her work included updating the payment extensions to know what currency is in use.  This way the proper formatting can be presented for online check payments. 

Coleman Watts of the core team worked on the framework for APIv4. You can see his work on GitHub.

The sprint was great and a lot was accomplished to move CiviCRM forward.  Personally, I am looking forward to the sprint after CiviCon in June.  

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