We did manage to hit the code freeze and branch date of Feb 26th. v1.7 is now off and living in its own branch. If you are using svn to get the latest version of the code base, make sure you switch to the v1.7 branch (svn switch is a useful command)
Blogs
From our friends at CivicActions comes the Draft Al Gore site using Drupal and CiviCRM. They use a pretty nifty thermometer module to track the amount of money coming in via CiviContribute.
It's been a while, i was trying to get Eclipse-BIRT working on my machine (Ubuntu Edgy). Finally got success few days back.
Here are the steps for installation:
1) Get the Eclipse using Ubuntu update manager.
sudo aptitude install eclipse
2) BIRT package is not installed by default in Eclipse. So use Eclipse update manager and select package BIRT Reporting Tool.
You might get few errors: - Could not write in /usr/lib .....
chmod -R 777 /usr/lib/eclipse
- I also got following errors: Requested operation cannot be performed because it would invalidate the current configuration. See details for more information.
I just finished implementing some cool features for customizing CiviCRM look and feel in v1.7. As most of you'll are aware CiviCRM follows a pretty good modular MVC (model-view-controller) architecture. We seperate the view (Smarty templates) from the code and business logic quite stringently and most of the display can be customized at the template level.
I've spent a fair amount of the weekend attempting to install FishEye from Cenqua. Its awesome that companies like Atlassian (wiki and issue tracking software) and Cenqua (coincidentally both these firms are Australian!) give away free licenses to open source projects like CiviCRM.
FishEye helps you analyze, search, share and monitor your source code repository (in our case svn). We've always wanted something a bit more fancy than what subversion offers out of the box (a vanilla http interface to the code). We also wanted better integration with JIRA and link issues to the appropriate revision of the code. FishEye promised to deliver on both these cases. We had also heard pretty good reviews of the product.
An interesting discussion spawned on the civicrm-dev list recently regarding our implementation of custom groups and fields. We have been super cautious about this and have advised people not to create more than 20 custom fields per object (contact, activity, group, relationship etc).