Blogs

CiviCRM uses the PEAR package DB_DataObject to access the mysql database. Doing so reduces the amount of sql we need to write to fetch / store values for a single table. For queries involving more than one table, we write them manually since since it was fairly painful to try to force complicated queries using DB_DataObject (we did use DB_DO for multiple table queries when we wrote EmailNow, in the end we felt the hoops we had to jump through was not worth the effort and hence the current scheme)

The basic PHP classes that represent a table are called DAO's (Data Access Objects)....

Make sure you read the Introduction Chapter of this series for a better understanding of the below. Developers might be interested in installing CiviCRM from our svn repository

Some of the important directories under CiviCRM svn root are:

• CRM: Most of the CiviCRM specific source code is stored in the directory. This directory is further sub-divided into other directories based on functionality (Core, Utils,...

Over the next few weeks, I will blog about the architecture of CiviCRM and some basic principles that we follow in the design/coding phase. In this series I’ll also talk about how we integrate with Drupal/Joomla and the scalability/performance/memory bottlenecks in CiviCRM.

CiviCRM is built on top of some incredibly powerful open source toolkits. They include:

• PHP, we use PHP 5.1 for development and will probably switch to PHP 5.2 in the next few weeks as our primary development platform. We restrict ourselves with the features that we...

So this week, our focus has been on getting some cool new features into CiviCRM v1.6. We figured that we'd take some baby steps into the wide world of web 2.0 and ajax and use Dojo as our toolkit of choice.

Yes we do know that Drupal chose JQuery and Joomla v1.5 has a combination of a few different ajax utilities. However, we did like the direction Dojo was moving in with a fairly nice large community along with some of the big names in the industry (IBM, Sun etc). We also did meet Alex Russell, one of the lead developers/architects and...