I recently cam across Givewell.net, a group that has recently stirred some activity in the non-profit blogosphere. For more information and details you should check out the Givewell blog.
They ask non-profits some specific questions and expect specific answers. Being a non-profit and an open source organization, I figured it would be a good exercise for us to answer those questions. Note that like most of my other blog entries, this is a quick unplanned writing exercise ...
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February 24, 2007
By kurund Filed under CiviReportIt'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.
February 22, 2007
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRMGood background reading for ACL's can be found in the Wikipedia entry
Permissioning is quite important in CRM systems. CiviCRM used Drupal's permissioning system and stretched it a fair amount till v1.6. It had two major disadvantages: One, our joomla users do not have access to the permissioning model. Two, the Drupal model did not scale very well from a user interface perspective. This was primarily because it displayed all the permissions as a grid. If you had 300 roles and 300 smart groups, drupal displayed a table with 90,000 checkboxes. The browser would definitely not be happy with this chunk of HTML
February 21, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM
Here is a tentative release schedule for v1.7. As in any software project, these dates are tentative and subject to delays. UPDATE: I've updated to our latest dates
February 21, 2007
By shot Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM
I got myself a new development machine last Thursday, and the old one spectacularly failed two hours later (talk about timing). This means I ended up with a clean install of Ubuntu (I went with the development version of Feisty Fawn, but the below should work for the stable Edgy Eft as well) and can share with you how to setup a CiviCRM development sandbox from scratch.
This tutorial is very Ubuntu-centric, but should be easily adaptable to other (especially Unix-based) operating systems. You can of course skip all the parts that are already working in your install.
February 18, 2007
By lobo Filed under CiviCRMI 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.
February 17, 2007
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRMI'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.
February 14, 2007
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRMAn 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).
February 14, 2007
By Dave Greenberg Filed under CiviCRMWith lots of excitement and anticipation on the mailing list regarding upcoming 1.7 features - the team has been pushing hard to keep on schedule for alpha release by the end of this month. As of this morning, we're down to 19 open issues out of a total of 80 posted for the release! We're shooting to get this down below 15 by weeks end.
There has definitely been some "scope creep" for 1.7 beyond the committed issues on the road-map. The good news is that these additions have been the result of community feedback and are responses to the real-world use cases that folks are bringing to the team. We're doing our best to balance responsiveness to these requests with the need to get releases out on a regular and timely basis.
February 14, 2007
By Dave Greenberg Filed under CiviCRM, TeamsSeveral CiviCRM folks will be attending two upcoming conferences in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both conferences should provide great opportunities to learn, share and network with other folks in the non-profit and open source software communities.
Aspiration will be hosting the 2007 Nonprofit Software Development Summit in Oakland next week (February 21-23). I am looking forward to lively conversations there regarding best practices and trends in FLOSS non-profit software development. Michal Mach from our Polish contingent is hoping to join us there and lead a session on Localisation approaches and challenges. We can also carve out time for an informal CiviCRM "users" gathering if there's interest.
