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CiviSchool - Online forms to update student / family information

Published
2010-06-09 15:22
Written by
lobo
We've been hard at work implementing an online set of forms to collect family information for the school module. This is one of our final projects for the year and eliminates the tedious summer ritual for the admin staff of sending paper forms to the 200 school families and for the parent to fill out the same information every year. This also saves the admin staff from entering that same information into the SIS We've built this work on the parent portal that we launched late last year. Parents can update information on themselves and their children anytime via their drupal account. The form is composed of 5 sub-forms:
  • Household Information: Name, Email, Phone and Address of the household. We currently support 2 household and 4 contacts. These are stored as CiviCRM contacts with a relationship link of type Parent / Child to the student. We created a custom group to store which household a parent belonged to. We did not use CiviCRM's household functionality.
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Writing a custom import script ..

Published
2010-05-28 10:01
Written by
Anonymous (not verified)

The next phase of the CiviSchool project is collecting and maintaining all parent / student information online. This avoids the annual filling out forms work by the parents, and also the stuffing of envelopes by school staff during the summer and reentering all the information in the SIS when school starts.

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Looking for Beta Testers for the School Module

Published
2009-12-04 06:52
Written by
lobo
Some of you'll are aware of the work i've done for The San Francisco School using Drupal 6.x / CiviCRM 2.2. You can read more technical details about this project on my blog.

Database

  • Maintain name/email/phone/address information for people associated with the school (students, staff and parents)
  • Maintain relationships between parents and their children
  • Maintain relationships between a teacher / advisor and their students

Current Features deployed at SFS

  • Give all parents and staff a login/password
  • Online signups for all Parent Teacher Conferences
  • Online signups for all extended care activity (classes after school)
  • Sign-in / Sign-out for students attending extended care
  • Computation of how many "activity" blocks a student has spent on extended care
  • Parent viewing of the various extended care activities their kids have attended in the past
  • Online maps of "Where we Live" of the school families
  • Online directories of the schools and grades.
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Handling Attendance for Extended Care Activities in CiviCRM

Published
2009-12-01 11:30
Written by
lobo
This is a continuing series of blog posts on deploying CiviCRM at San Francisco School. In the previous blog posts we discussed how to expose relationship information in a profile and how to manage parent teacher conferences. There are also some slides explaining the module from a recent training seminar Our latest project was automating the extended care (classes before and after school) system. The previous process was quite manual and labor intensive (and error prone). The attendance sheet was printed (via a CiviReport) from the students signed in. The students queued up and were signed into the extended care program. Some of the students had to be manually written in (if they were not signed up). At the end of the day, the parents would pick up the child and locate the childs name in the multiple sheets and sign them out. Typically 10-20% of parents would not sign their children out. The business office would then take this piece of paper and then calculate the "activity blocks" (based on time spent in extended care) and enter them in an excel spreadsheet. There were a few exceptions to the rule (children of staff, students who signed up for unlimited extended care and some activities are free)
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More adventures with the school module

Published
2009-08-21 08:38
Written by
lobo
I continue my work on deploying CiviCRM for my kids school. In previous blog posts i documented how to use hooks and custom templates to schedule parent teacher conferences and extended care activities and how to expose relationship information in a profile view. In this blog post I'll describe some more advanced features. I'll also describe the code and directory structure.

New Code Structure and Directory Layout

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Adapting CiviCRM for the needs of a school ...

Published
2009-08-13 19:31
Written by
lobo

I've been working on customizing CiviCRM for my kids school. I documented how i exposed relationship information on a profile view in this blog post. In the past week i've also exposed "activities" and "a multiple record custom group" via profiles which i'll describe in this blog post. All this work was done via civicrm hooks and custom templates and run on CiviCRM v2.2.8. You can download the code from here.

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Exposing relationship data in CiviCRM profile view

Published
2009-07-29 12:53
Written by
lobo
I'm working on deploying CiviCRM for my kids school website. Part of the project requires us to expose the parent <-> child relationship information on the website and allow parents to edit their child information. I accomplished this using a combination of civicrm hooks, custom templates, permissioned relationships and custom code in a drupal module. You can access the module and template code here. The broad steps are:
  • Implement hook_civicrm_pageRun for the profile view page (CRM_Profile_Page_Dynamic). Only implement this hook for the specific profile id's you want relationship information. In this case we have two profiles, a Parent Profile (gid=3) and a Student Profile (gid=4)
  • The pageRun hook also adds the module's template directory to the smarty include path, so we dont have to set it globally. This also allow multiple modules to append different template directories to the template include path (check the function _sfschool_initialize)
  • The hook gets either the parent or the child information using a custom query. We ensure that only permissioned parents can see their child information (in case of some complicated family structures). The queries are relatively simple at this stage, i suspect they will increase in complexity over the next few weeks
  • The hook exposes the information gathered from the database to the smarty template
  • The custom template (templates/CRM/Profile/Page/3/Dynamic.tpl) uses that information to display the relationship data on the page. I also edited the View.tpl template to eliminate the "Back to Listings" link.
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