Keep up-to-date with blogs from the core team, working groups, developers, users and champions worldwide.
We made excellent progress on our 1.6 queue last week. All but one of the issues targeted have been moved into resolved status. The queue is now down to 12 items (from 23 last week). Some team members will be moving into active QA mode this week - doing regression testing on the 1.6 resolved queue to verify that things haven't gotten broken since they were resolved earlier in the release cycle.
For the coming week we'll try to get the queue down to 5 issues or less... and finish...
Read moreOver 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:
It's been almost 2 wonderful years that I have been working on CiviCRM project, since we started development in India. From then things have changed. We started with a single file, (I think it was CRUD.php) which no longer exists :). What excites me the most about CiviCRM is the challenges that we face in implementing new features and the opportunity to work on advanced technologies. The scope is simply unlimited...
CiviCRM is not just another software, it is driven by the needs of the community, which makes this project very special to me. Since this software has also...
Read moreSo 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...
Read moreWe made decent progress on our 1.6 queue last week. Some of the issues we targeted for resolution are still in progress, but the queue is now down to 23 items (from 39 last week).
For the coming week we'll try to get the queue down to around 10 issues and resolve the following larger issues:
Another feature that we worked on this week was integrating the "standard" version of PayPal as an additional payment option for CiviContribute. We waited for quite a few months for PayPal (or Google) to release a nice web 2.0 api for subscriptions / recurring transactions, but that did not seem to be happening. So we took the plunge and decided to implement PayPal Web Standards as the first step towards implementing PayPal Subscriptions (basically recurring donations)
PayPal has done an incredible job of documenting their API's and making the integration fairly easy. It helped...
Read moreWe are just wrapping up our first implementation of access control lists (ACL) in CiviCRM (for v1.6). This gives us a framework for building fairly sophisticated access permissions into the data model and allowing fine granularity of who can view/edit/delete various sections of your contact database
Our first implementation replicates what we currently achieve with drupal's permissioning system. A CiviCRM admin can partition their contact database into multiple sections, and give view/edit access to different "roles". Integrating this into the core allows us to expose this...
Read moreWe have been thinking it would be useful to share our team goals with the community on a regular basis - so folks have a clearer idea of what we're working on (without wading through the details in the Issue Tracker).
We currently have 39 open issues on the 1.6 queue - and we need to knock-off at least 10 next week in order to be on-track for 1.6 beta. Here's the issues we'd definitely like to resolve:
We've been working on the Branner Project and writing code to help analyze the applications and process them in a suitable manner. The application collects a fair amount of data across multiple pages and as such is not very conducive to reading on the web.
We wanted to analyze the data in Excel. The database is relational and hence hierarchical. CSV is not a great format for this purpose. So we wrote a CiviCRM -> XML converter and got all the data we needed in a nice easy to understand /...
Read moreCiviMail is a component that allows the users to create, send, track and manage CiviCRM-based mailings. In CiviCRM 1.5, CiviMail underwent speed and memory optimisations; in CiviCRM 1.6 we’re concentrating on usability improvements.
CiviMail users can create mailings sent to a single CiviCRM group (both regular and ‘smart’) as well as group sums and differences; the recipient list can also be based on inclusions and exclusions of previous mailings’ addressees. The mailing template can contain various recipient-specific tokens, replaced...
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