Tools

civix is a development tool. It generates code for extensions, providing a baseline for developers and hackers who want to improve and add onto CiviCRM.

civix generates a lot of code. Much of this code is educational; hopefully, some of it is even useful. But some parts of it are redundant or excessive. The excess bits don't matter much with a single extension. However, in practice, they are copied to almost every extension. Individually, these are small bits. Collectively, they add up.

Thanks to some work by MGlaman and KarinG and others, some integration with the Mink/Behat front-end testing framework is now available for you to use to write automated tests. Does it replace regular phpunit? No, you should still write regular tests too. But let's take a look at what it can add.

What are front-end tests? They're tests that automate controlling a browser to fill out fields and click on buttons, as opposed to the usual back-end tests that might check the output of a function.

As part of the ongoing website upgrade, the CiviCRM extension directory has received a few upgrades. More precisely, we changed a few configurations and workflows on the page listing CiviCRM extensions and how new releases (extension updates) are regularly added to that directory.

Starting with the interface changes on the directory, we adjusted the filters to remove some redundancies:

Let's share stories, ideas and code. Containers are good for sharing.

Like all interesting questions, this has three worthwhile answers: yes, no, and maybe. Let's explore them all.

In 1992, there was a little known new thing called the world wide web. By 1995, it was a "thing". Now, what exactly do those quotes do to the word "thing"? And what does this have to do with "entities"? Cue my favorite programming joke.

Introducing WordPress Content Views for CiviCRM which uses the new Data Processor extension for CiviCRM to provide easy to design and beautiful layouts and listings of CiviCRM information on your WordPress website.

This blog post explains how you could insert data from a CSV file into CiviCRM. We use Pentaho Data Integration to read the CSV file and to call a Form Processor in CiviCRM.

This blog post is an example and when you follow the steps described in this post you can run the same import as me.

Pentaho is a tool to extract and transform data.

The form processor is an extension to create end points for forms in CiviCRM. Those end points can then be called through the api.

Prerequisites:

In CiviCRM currently, if a Membership Type has Membership records in CiviCRM there is no way in the CiviCRM administration interface to change the Relationship Types that will be used to inherit this membership. We now have an CiviCRM extension which solves this problem.

Have you ever wished you could configure the actions you can perform after a search in CiviCRM?

It is now possible to do this with the Search Action Designer extension.

An example use case

How can we find a user-friendly way of creating templates for serial letters and other mass communication? Is it possible to integrate CiviCRM with open-source online applications to facilitate the creation of office templates for our users?

This has been bothering us for some time, because many of our users find it hard to set up and work with templates in HTML format. So we started a proof of concept to check possible options… and we found an answer!

In this blog post I want to show how you could use the new form processor extension to handle form submissions from an external website.

My (imaginary) organisation provides buddies for young people and the form on our website is submitted when somebody is interested in becoming a buddy for a teenager. We ask for the name, address, e-mail, telephone number, birth date and gender.

Last year at #17NTC, I met a consultant who reminded me of the dreaded phone call, “Hey, a colleague referred me to you and I want to get a quote for moving to CiviCRM.” Those phone calls are often challenging, as the client hasn’t done much in the way of organizing their needs and helping us help them.

Hi everyone! I'm Andy, and I'm working on the OSDI integration project for GSoC 2018. If you want more information about what this project is all about, check out the GitLab here. The source code is here. The OSDI standard is a set of standards for interoperability between products in progressive movements. For more information about OSDI, click here.

I have finished a working prototype of the form-processor and action-provider extension. See my previous blog post for where the idea came from.

Below I will explain what you can do with this extension. Lets assume we have an external website where students can signup to volunteer in a summer program. When a student has signed up we want this data to be present in CiviCRM and the student added to the group student volunteers.

Last week we had a Sprint in the wonderful city of Brussels. This blog post is a recap of what I have been up to.

Form Processor

I started the sprint to work on a new extension the form processor.  This idea came to my mind as I had a few clients at which I had to develop a custom api for data coming from their website (in those cases CiviCRM was separated from the website). And my idea was that I wanted to give system administrator and implementers a tool in which they could create those kind of API by themselves. So the form processor was born.

The power of Workplace by Facebook is now available for CiviCRM users!

New button in the User Profile opens up a communication channel within CiviCRM for work chat, team groups, project updates, instant messages or alerts (see pic. 1 below). The functionality will noticeably improve communication across organization inside or outside the office as it falls back on all the strengths Facebook has to offer, the most prominent being the user-friendly familiar interface and secure collaboration.

CiviCooP and Systopia and Palasthotel have been working together on CiviProxy and CiviProxy. This blog is a round up of what we have achieved in the last couple of days. The first thing we have achieved is that we had fun and a very good work atmosphere. We made long days and made lots of progress.

What are CiviProxy and CiviMcRestFace?

If you are a Drupal developer coming new to CiviCRM, it can be a bit of a "culture shock" to realize that CiviCRM is not your typical Drupal module.

CiviCRM has a separate and independent evolution and ecosystem, and its standard practices and APIs reflect that. From installation of the module itself, to creating customizations and modifications of its standard behavior, you are entering into a different "world" when you implement and develop client solutions with CiviCRM.