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We've been having a great gathering and an incredibly productive code sprint at wonderful Cawthorpe, UK. Thanx to Dave Moreton from Circle Interactive for organizing the logistics and making this event possible.

Over the past few weeks, at least 6 people have asked a very similar question on the forums. I want to extend the results from the Contact / Contribute / Member search form and display these fields instead of my least favorite fields. For example, users want to see the organization and job title of their contacts in the search form instead of country and post code. Or the total amount someone has contributed to the organization as part of the contribution search results. We had a few ways of doing this, but not very elegant.

I wanted to address and solve this during the code sprint. I looked at the code and initially came up with two hooks: one for the search headers and one for the search results. In a conversation with Kurund, we figured that one hook was a lot easier for downstream developers. I took a closer look and found an even better place to introduce the new hook: hook_civicrm_searchColumns. This will be part of 3.4.6

Basically, in the hook you modify the headers and values and inject / modify both the arrays as you see fit. The search templates currently are hard-wired to what it is going to display. So in some cases you might need to customize the search template also. You can work around this if you are keeping the same columns and overwriting the values in the array.

After a big conversation at the coding sprint, we seem to be in consensus about transitioning CiviCRM's revision control system from using subversion to using git.

If you are a user or integrator that installs CiviCRM by downloading the zip or tar ball from the CiviCRM site, this transition won't affect you in any way.

Several CiviCRM users have expressed an interest in managing CiviCRM activities with a smooth, interactive calendar screen.  Since calendaring can be a complex topic, we've put together a basic, working calendar to facilitate discussion.  The prototype resembles the calendar included in other relationship-management tools:

If you've ever configured a schedule task (aka cron job) for CiviCRM, you know the routine. You have to look up the username and password for a user in your database that has database permissions, you have to find a really long mess of characters known as your site key, you have to find the proper name of the job you want (like UpdateAddress.php or civimail.cronjob.php) and then you must string them all together in precisely the right way to make the cron job.

What a tedious drag.

I´m Abril from Mexico City, I´m working in Alternativas y Capacidades, a civil society organization that was founded in 2002  to contribute to Mexico’s social development, by strengthening civil society organizations and grant makers, working towards a favorable environment for their professionalization, promoting their advocacy capacities and encouraging inter-sectoral collaboration.

We've been working hella hard on the sprint so far and yesterday was no exception!  at least for the book sprinters, the coders went off on a social to Stamford castle.  Although they weren't out of contact for long, we met up with them on IRC while they stopped for a Costa coffee "Come for the coffee, stay for the WiFi" or so the saying goes .  

On a system with roughly 25,000 activities, running on a dedicated server, the case dashboard would take over a minute to load. Other orgs have reported similar problems, and in at least two cases the consultants simply removed the upcoming/recent sections from the dashboard since it was just too slow.

Taking for example the upcoming section, on the server above the query would take about 26 seconds. With some optimization, it now takes less than 1 second.