Judy Hallman sent in this write-up from the
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April 9, 2007
By Dave Greenberg Filed under Architecture, CiviCRMDevelopers who are working on integrating CiviCRM with other modules and/or developing contributions for CiviCRM need to have a good understanding of the database structure.
What data is stored in what tables?
What type and size of data is valid for a given field?
How are the various tables connected to each other?
This information can also be helpful when tracking down and potential bug or installation problem.
Entity Relationship Diagrams or ERD's provide a graphical representation of database structure. AND...Ben Vautier (SQL Recipes) has graciously contributed (and is maintaining) a pretty comprehensive ERD for CiviCRM and it's componenents (including CiviEvent).
April 1, 2007
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRMWe made a few major changes to the v1.7 search interface for a big improvement in performance. The first change was to ot use a wildcard for the prefix. Thus when a user searches on NAME, we only search for 'NAME%', in older version we would search for '%NAME%'. This allows mysql to use the index on sort_name and is significantly faster than a full table scan. The second change involved not searching the 'email' table when doing a search on 'name'.
March 29, 2007
By Dave GreenbergFiled under With version 1.7 "almost" out the door, the CiviCRM planning team spent most of this week's team meeting evaluating potential "big ticket" items for 1.8 and discussing future platform requirements for CiviCRM.
The platform issues are:
When do we drop support for PHP 4.x?
When do we drop support for MySQL 4.1
There are compelling technical and management arguments for requiring PHP 5.x and MySQL 5. On the management side, we estimate that it costs the project approximately 4-6 person-weeks of extra time to code, test and debug the PHP 4 version. As the codebase grows - this cost of supporting two very different programming models grows. These are resources that we'd prefer to use improving the overall functionality, usability and quality of the software.
March 27, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRMUSPIRG has decided to work on CiviCRM as the Code for Change project this summer!. Should be a great value add to the CiviCRM community. Thanx to Wes Morgan and USPIRG for choosing CiviCRM. From their website:
Code for Change is an exciting new program which brings together computer science students and recent graduates in the summer to lead an open source software development project. The projects will vary from year to year, but they'll tend to focus on furthering the online organizing work of U.S. PIRG and, being open source, lots of other organizations as well.
This summer, we'll be working on the CivicSpace project to make it a world class online organizing platform. By the end of the summer, organizations working on issues ranging from preserving our last remaining wild forests to preventing human rights abuses will be able to take advantage of our work to get more and more people involved in their issues online.
March 25, 2007
By Dave Greenberg Filed under CiviCRM
I spent last Thursday and Friday at the Open Source CMS Conference (OSCMS 2007) - hosted by Yahoo! in Sunnyvale. It was a high-energy gathering of smart folks who are passionate about software and open source - with an especially large concentration of Drupal developers and integrators.
CiviCRM Session
Gregory Heller from CivicActions joined me in presenting a session on CiviCRM on Friday morning. Despite the fact that we were scheduled opposite Dries Butaert (Drupal founder) - we had a good showing. I gave folks an overview of CiviCRM - with an emphasis on CMS integration approaches (profiles, user registration, APIs and hooks). Then Greg showed off live examples of each of these techniques on some of the cool sites that CivicActions has developed using CiviCRM.
March 24, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRMWe are excited to announce that our 1.7 Beta release is now available for download. This release features the new CiviEvent component, which provides integrated event registration and management, along with a new "Contact Dashboard" which gives constituents a consolidated view of their subscriptions, contributions,event registrations and more.
Other release highlights include: Create and save re-usable email templates (with mail-merge tokens) CiviContribute plugins for Authorize.net and Google Checkout Use customized versions of templates for any screen One-click copying for existing Profiles, Contribution Pages and Events
March 22, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRMWe've integrated support for Google Checkout in CiviCRM v1.7. This was primarily on the initiative and lead of Deepak, part of our awesome India developement team. This also allowed us to compare the ease of use and integration between the two transaction providers. Here are some things we found:
PayPal has a much richer and more well thought out SDK. They do quite a few things right from a developers perspective, primarily allowing the code to set various defaults (like the return url)
Have the Google Checkout folks tried to use the sandbox with the awful "sandbox" background that they use. Makes it fairly hard to read and navigate the site
March 22, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRMRob Thorne from Torenware networks just announced the release of CiviVoter and Canvasser on the CiviCRM Mailing list (link to e-mail ). The Green Party of Canada sponsored this work and has released it under the Academic Free License v3.0. This is a pretty important component for political parties and we'd like to get a fair amount of feedback and review from the community. A future version of this component will be included in CiviCRM.
March 19, 2007
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRMThe nice thing about developing software is that the work is never done. There are so many cool things that we can do to make CiviCRM a better application. I've been having some pretty good conversations with David Strauss of Four Kitchen Studios on our IRC channel (#civicrm at irc.freenode.net). Four Kitchen Studios has been a great resource for CiviCRM and were instrumental in deploying CiviCRM within Wikipedia. In the recent past, David has initiated the de-dupe and contact merge algorithm which we hope to incorporate in CiviCRM v1.8.
Some of the various things that we hope to be part of v2.0. We will use a fair amount of the design and code from the v1.x series, but at the same time make significant changes when needed.
