Blog posts by Eileen

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Oktober 13, 2010
By Eileen Filed under CiviCRM

Just a quick update to say that the 'de-dupe exception table' initiative is now funded for release 3.3. This will allow those poor souls struggling through a big de-dupe to mark some contacts as 'non-matches' and not have to wade through them every time.

 

This initiative was sponsored by

 

Creative Commons

Community Builders Australia Pty Ltd

Australian Greens

NES Alumni and Friends Nonprofit Partnership

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September 21, 2010
By Eileen Filed under CiviCRM
So, far the response to Civi-Make-it-Happen has been good. We have got one small item sponsored into 3.3 and a number of donations towards the other items. It also shows on the second search page when you google for 'Make it Happen' :-). As discussed previously there is an option to have your money refunded if the target is not reached by the deadline. Of the contributions made so far the only person who took up that option was contributing towards the CMS User Merge enhancement that is being funded. My perception is that the contributions made so far are primarily by individuals and consultants or end-users who engage directly with CiviCRM (rather than larger organisations who may engage the services of a consultant) and that they are primarily given in support of CiviCRM rather than reflecting a business decision to invest in getting desired functionality. Perhaps I should ask more questions on the contribution page!

 

We are extending the 3.3 deadline to the 3rd of October to make one last push towards getting more of the initiatives into 3.3 and after that the focus will move to trying to get some more momentum for 3.4. Personally I would LOVE to see the dedupe exception table item get some funding. Anyone who has done deduping themselves will understand why!

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September 9, 2010
By Eileen Filed under CiviCRM

I'm pleased to announce that the target for the first of the Civi-Make-it-Happen initiatives has been reached. We have raised $750 to fund enhancing the dedupe functionality to merge CMS user accounts when de-duping. Those of us who are familiar with the experience of clicking on each contact to see which one has a userID before clicking merge will be pleased to see this enhancement and grateful to those who donated.

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September 5, 2010
By Eileen Filed under CiviCRM

Sometimes I get frustrated with CiviCRM. For all the great features there are problems / limitations that we seem to keep hitting. So, if lots of people want the same things added / fixed why aren’t they being fixed?

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August 25, 2010
By Eileen Filed under CiviCRM

We have been looking at whether it is a good idea to use households and thought I would pull together the various things that have been written about households into a bit of a 'where are they at'.

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Juli 28, 2010
By Eileen Filed under CiviPledge, CiviCRM, Drupal

When working in setting up and developing websites (among other things) we often have to choose between getting stuck in and getting stuff done the known way or trying to invest time in coming up with a more automated way or efficient way of doing things. Usually at some point we become aware of whether we made the right choice – and I find that moment is normally accompanied by a certain sinking feeling.

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Juni 5, 2010
By Eileen Filed under CiviCRM, Drupal
So, amongst all the discussion of import methods lately I just wanted to flag another possible approach - creating a CiviCRM hook module for the Drupal migrate module There are a bunch of great blogs out there on how to use the table wizard module with the migrate module to import data from various mysql tables or views into Drupal nodes / users / taxonomies / content types - for example: http://www.lullabot.com/articles/drupal-data-imports-migrate-and-table-wizard The migrate module has a bunch of hooks to allow you to use it for other forms of migrations. I rattled up the module / code pasted at the end of this blog in a couple of hours as a proof of content for using this approach to CiviCRM imports. The code I threw together just offers up civicrm_contact table fields but I think there must be some clever ways to use existing import tools rather than this rudimentary approach.
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Mai 29, 2010
By Eileen Filed under CiviCRM

A while ago I mentioned that I was finding the backup and migrate module a better option to syncing Civi installs that the Civi drush command and Lobo asked if I would do a write-up on it.

I'm going to keep this pretty brief but I think it is worth telling people about as I find it really quick & easy.

http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate (AKA BAM)

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Januar 4, 2010
By Eileen Filed under Finance and Accounting

This is really a continuation of previous blogs on CiviCRM accounting integration. I now have some basic integration bewteen CiviCRM and Xero working and decided to do a screencast.

Screencasts are hardly my preferred medium - especially now that I've tried to make one but I thought it might be useful for people to see what a CiviCRM integration with the accounting package Xero would look like. The screencast doesn't show you any CiviCRM - just Xero and is more intended to give people an idea of what the day-to-day reality of it is.

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