Blogs

Keep up-to-date with blogs from the core team, working groups, developers, users and champions worldwide. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive regular updates by email. We also have an RSS feed.
April 29, 2010
By lobo Filed under CiviCon, CiviCRM, Documentation, Drupal, Sprints

The past 8 days have been an amazing period for the CiviCRM community and core team members. Its been incredibly intense, extremely fulfilling and mind-blowing. A huge thank you and tip of the hat to the members of the community who participated in the event and came together from various parts of the world (asia, europe, north america) to push the project to greater heights, from a usability, documentation and localization viewpoint.

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April 28, 2010
By shot Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM, Drupal, Internationalization and Localization, Sprints
As you have already read in the previous blog posts, one of the outcomes of the translation sprint is the fact that we’re switching our translation server to a new tool, Transifex. We decided to go with Transifex for various reasons: Transifex allows teams of people to collaborate on translations – this is not an issue when you have a single person working on a translation, but as soon as you have two or more contributors working remotely, it’s crucial to use a tool that streamlines the process and allows for easy and centralised communication, the user hierarchy is simple, clean and seems to be efficient: project maintainers accept language maintainers who, in turn, accept language team members and coordinate given language’s development, project maintainers can announce localisation-oriented things on the project’s page, teams can have discussions on the per-language discussion boards, the user interface for translations is better and easier to work with, and has the (dubious for some languages, but useful for others) ability to fetch Google Translate suggestions on-the-fly, PO files can be locked for work in offline tools (like Poedit, Virtaal or others) and the locking is visible to other contributors.
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April 28, 2010
By xavier Filed under Documentation
It is midnight, we are busy finishing proof-reading the last chapters, after having been spoiled one more time with a scrumptious dinner cooked by an amazing Jill. After 4 days, time to put some numbers on this sprint: 5 squirrels, 8 chipmunks, dozen of blue jays 2 coyotes, and 1 bernese mountain dog, tough job to guard a herd of writers and 11 000 words, spread around a lot of new chapters both aiming the users of CiviCRM and the developers.
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April 27, 2010
By goran Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM, Sprints
It is said that optimizing too early is the root of all evil. However it is not so easy to say when is the right time. Looking at CiviCRM performance there are a number of instances where even on medium sized installations search queries take a long time to execute. One of the searches that caught my eye is the AJAX search at the top left in the menu bar. Returning a maximum of ten entries from a medium sized database (~50k records) should take negligible time and on the CiviCRM test data this request was taking around 3 seconds (putting full load on server).
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April 27, 2010
By SarahGladstone Filed under CiviCRM, Documentation

Everyone is continuing to produce an incredible amount of content for the book, plus rework and update areas that were showing some age. The new set of chapters for developers and people who want to extend CiviCRM is really fantastic. Everyone who has been wanting to extend CiviCRM, but didn't know where to start should be able to dive in. Everyone is increasing their knowledge of CiviCRM, getting ideas for new features and improving existing features.

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April 26, 2010
By bgm Filed under CiviCRM, Internationalization and Localization, Sprints
Today's localisation sprint started with a presentation from Piotr on how multilingual installations works in CiviCRM. Multilingual is when you want to have not only a localised interface, but many co-existing languages. So for example the labels of custom fields may need to be in English or Spanish if the organisation has a bilingual website. In general, most labels can be translated using multilingual, but not the data itself. The main except to this is the contact name, so that it can be entered in multiple alphabets.
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April 26, 2010
By mbriney Filed under CiviCase, Architecture, CiviCon, CiviCRM, Teams

The following notes were gathered from the CiviCon session on what the community would like to see in CiviCRM 4.0:

* Goals * No new features * Framework switch * Not as major a rewrite as it looks * Don't want to change many of the private APIs * Want to switch away from pear * Test unit coverage * Better API hooks * What users would like to see * Continuous Integration * Hudson - as you submit code runs through suite of unit tests to see what's broken * Better decoupling * Drupal Forms API

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April 26, 2010
By michaelmcandrew Filed under Documentation

It's 5 to midnight and we're just wrapping up. Mr Kurund says that I can't go to bed until I've written this post, so...

Participating in the second book sprint is just as fascinating as it was the first time around, but the dynamic is definitely different. Having a book in place already makes a big difference - there's no panicking that we'll end up with the sections half finished, and it is easier to cover components when a lot of the design decisions have already been made. Having already written sections on the components is especially helpful when covering new components.

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April 25, 2010
By scyrma Filed under CiviCRM, Internationalization and Localization, Sprints

Well, it's been done, we chose the translation platform: Transifex. We're fully aware that we did not actually choose a platform that fully supports the ideal situation, but such a platform does not exists. This is more the choice of a promising back-end which we hope we can eventually develop into the ideal situation.

The interesting part in the discussion was finding a balance between the technical and functional interests.

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April 25, 2010
By michal Filed under CiviCRM, Internationalization and Localization, Sprints
That's right, you probably noticed there are two sprints going on here in Tahoe. You can read the report from the book sprint in Jack blog post, now it's time you found out what's the second sprint about.
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