Blog posts by lobo

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July 28, 2008
By lobo Filed under Drupal, Joomla
This camp is now confirmed. The dates are Oct 13th / 14th. Follow up blog post here Following the lead from our friends at Ubercart with Ubercamp, we figured having CiviCamp might not be a bad idea. We suspect that doing it around BADCamp will give folks the opportunity who are traveling to combine two unconferences in one visit. Proposed Dates BADCamp is schedule for Oct 11/12, CiviCamp will be held on Oct 13/14.
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July 25, 2008
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM

We've been getting a few favorable reviews recently. Some of the ones that we've found are:

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July 19, 2008
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM

Integrating CiviCRM with an email client (specifically Outlook) has been a long requested feature. Unfortunately we dont really have any internal windows expertise to make this happen (for now). For now, we've built some code for the HRD project that attaches incoming email as an activity to the contact record of emails that are in the from / to / cc / bcc fields (we create a contact record if not found)

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June 28, 2008
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM, Drupal
The Drupal Views module has some pretty cool functionality. Views 2 fixed the "everything is a node" concept from Views 1, this enables integration with CiviCRM (which does nothing with nodes). A concise description of Views from its project page: This tool is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. CiviCRM profiles (in view/search mode) behaves like views. However it is not a flexible or configurable as views is for the end user. Integrating with views also allows the potential of integrating CiviCRM information with other Drupal specific information. e.g. Contact information on folks who are most active on your blog / forum / comments I took user.views.inc as a model and started hacking away to create civicrm.views.inc. You can get a copy of that file from our svn respository. So far its quite simple and just integrates the civicrm_contact and civicrm_email tables. I hope to add the phone/address fields in the next couple of hours/days and get a better idea of how to potentially generalize it.
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June 18, 2008
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM
From a forum post by Chris Burgess (with Green Party NZ). A related blog post is: Another approach to ACL and permissioning for hierarchical organizations Our (Drupal5+CiviCRM2.0) site needed a regional ACL implementation in order to give us the ability to easily grant access for our internal staff to contacts in their geographic region. Because we have staff at a provincial, regional and branch level, we needed to be able to configure permissions for each level. We did this by implementing code which overrides the ACL implementation in CiviCRM. I'd appreciate any input and suggestions on our methodology - it's a work in progress, but it's working well for us so far.
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June 17, 2008
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM
CiviEvent is one of the more popular components in CiviCRM (followed by CiviContribute, CiviMember and CiviMail). We have improved CiviEvent significantly in the past few releases and more improvements are slated for CiviEvent in v2.1. With this increased usage, we've seen more folks using Price Sets. Briefly, price sets gives admins the option to break an event into smaller pieces and charge for each selected piece. Price Sets was one of the first significant of code contributions to CiviCRM (thanx to Ideal Solutions and Marshal Newrock). We were planning to restructure this code in 2.2, but there were two missing features which came up a few times with some of our 'regular' users. The first missing feature was that two options in a price set item could not have the same amount. In order to include meals on multiple days with the same price, you would have to separate them into different items. Price Sets did not allow an amount of 0 either in an option. Fixing this was relatively easy, we just shuffled around a few fields that we used in the civicrm_option_value table to fix the above problems.
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June 10, 2008
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM, Joomla

We've had the ability to add one/more CiviCRM Profiles to the drupal registration page since the first release (thanx to the flexibility of Drupal hooks). This was not possible in Joomla 1.0.x and we hoped the 1.5.x series might help solve this issue and be more open. While Joomla 1.5 is a major step forward in multiple aspects, it did not address this issue. So to some extent we were stuck. I was hoping for someone in the community to step up and do the needful.

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June 8, 2008
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM
With Blackbaud's acquisition of Kintera, there has been some talk of what this means for the nonprofit sector. This along with Convio's acquistion of GetActive last year reduces the options available for the medium-large size NPO's. This is not a bad thing for us, since it makes open source software like Joomla, Drupal and CiviCRM a more attractive option. On that line, I started thinking about some of the big holes in the CiviCRM feature set / ecosystem. Here's my current list:
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June 3, 2008
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM
So while doing the custom data hook, CRM-1594, I also implemented a hook for setting the default values of a 'Form' in CiviCRM, CRM-3176. So now we have a defaults and validate hook for the form object. The two missing hooks are for buildQuickForm and postProcess, which I'm planning to implement in the next couple of days. This coupled with template customization will allow developers to inject form elements and save them to the database (similar to drupal hook_form_alter). I'm also planning to implement the ACL improvements as an ACL related hook (along with a sample implementation). These new features should give CiviCRM developers more power and flexibility in tailoring CiviCRM to their specific needs without hacking core.
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June 2, 2008
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM
With the new custom data model in 2.0, it seemed a good time to allow developers to add columns to a custom group that are computed rather than entered. Some examples of this is computing the GPA of a student given the student's individual grades, computing the age of a contact given his/her birthday. This has been an outstanding issue, CRM-1594, for quite some time.
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