Blogs

If you've ever configured a schedule task (aka cron job) for CiviCRM, you know the routine. You have to look up the username and password for a user in your database that has database permissions, you have to find a really long mess of characters known as your site key, you have to find the proper name of the job you want (like UpdateAddress.php or civimail.cronjob.php) and then you must string them all together in precisely the right way to make the cron job.

What a tedious drag.

I´m Abril from Mexico City, I´m working in Alternativas y Capacidades, a civil society organization that was founded in 2002  to contribute to Mexico’s social development, by strengthening civil society organizations and grant makers, working towards a favorable environment for their professionalization, promoting their advocacy capacities and encouraging inter-sectoral collaboration.

We've been working hella hard on the sprint so far and yesterday was no exception!  at least for the book sprinters, the coders went off on a social to Stamford castle.  Although they weren't out of contact for long, we met up with them on IRC while they stopped for a Costa coffee "Come for the coffee, stay for the WiFi" or so the saying goes .  

On a system with roughly 25,000 activities, running on a dedicated server, the case dashboard would take over a minute to load. Other orgs have reported similar problems, and in at least two cases the consultants simply removed the upcoming/recent sections from the dashboard since it was just too slow.

Taking for example the upcoming section, on the server above the query would take about 26 seconds. With some optimization, it now takes less than 1 second.

Code sprint is always fun. It's gives you great opportunity to meet fellow civi folks, collaborate and implement kool stuff :). Last few days has been very interesting. Besides some great meals we also managed to get some work done. ( If you still don't know, food is the most important part of CiviCRM Sprints )

We had a good discussion that came up because we were discussing a change being made to lower the barriers that currently exist for evaluators of CiviCase. We thought it would be good to write down some things:

Goals for this sprint are quite ambitious - three books instead of updating only one, so second day was quite intensive. Alice with Robyn from Progressive Technology Project are making incredible progress on describing CiviCampaign, Michael from Third Sector Design (who's also book maintainer) and Dave from Circle Interactive are putting together freshly spinned off developer handbook, and Abril from Alternativas y Capacidades and myself writing about applications of CiviCRM in human rights work. Not too much more to say about today - everyone is typing their keyboards furiously, since there is still a lot of work ahead of us. Helen from Flossmanuals joined us today - she will be working with us as editor for the rest of the spring, looking out for inconsistencies in the book and helping us make more polished.

Maybe a few words about what we do with Abril - out goal is to prepare small booklet for organisations working in human rights field, with descriptive information about how CiviCRM can be used to make their work easier and more effective. We are writing about using CiviCRM as human rights violation documentation system, but also decided to describe a few most common activities, like fundraising, mobilising supporters, managing volunteers and also do a bit more research about existing examples. We're still at early stage - writing a log of notes, researching and exchanging ideas, but it seems like it will be quite interesting and useful material. Hold your fingers!

As it is well-known, you can never have too many Dave's, so we've gathered three of the four Dave's here (Dave G, Dave J, and Dave D) along with some nice and smart people not named Dave (Tim O, Yashoda), and are working towards incorporating some community feedback into CiviCase. A list of improvements we're currently working on here at the sprint includes: