Blog posts by chrisivens

Just a very quick post to let you guys know that the site that has consumed my life for the past 6 months has finally gone live. I am running a _very_ customised version of civicrm 2.1 on top of a drupal install. I'd like to thank all those that helped me to get to grips with the hows and wherefores of civicrm and for putting up with me on the irc channel.

Firstly, congratulations all the book sprinters. You did well. I'll be having a good read of it this weekend. Before I delve into some code I'd like to give you my motivation for doing what I'm about to describe. I need image uploading, ease of use and consistency. I also don't want to bother with maintaining 2 versions of fckeditor. I knew it shouldn't be too hard to get it working across to 2 systems and to be honest it wasn't. It took a little more to find out what the Image assist module needed though. A nice feature of fckeditor is that we get a nice button in the editor toolbar instead of the link below the textarea as it would normally be. To get fckeditor and image assist working in drupal together you will need to copy img_assist_fckeditor.js from fckeditor module folder into img_assist folder. If you get a white empty popup screen then you have missed this step out. On to some actual coding. Please make sure your drupal modules are all working before trying this for your own sanity's sake.

I had to add some price sets to our recent project and I think I managed to get both the existing system and the price set system to work side by side. To give you an idea of why I had to do it, think of this; you have a specific membership open to organisations, the amount that the organisation needs to pay to join is based on its size. A company of 2-4 people will pay less than a 300+ employee company.

I think that here in the UK, we're missing out on something. Ideally I would like to have a central place to communicate and support each other with civicrm. Hopefully this will help organise meet ups and other events in the same timezone.

I have set up a provisional group at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/civicrmuk/ if you could join up and start the ball rolling.

I'm putting this together to help the next version of civicrm. We needed a waiting list for events once they are full. Our needs will perhaps differ from a generic version but you have to start somewhere.

We started by detecting the state of the event with eventFull(). If it's full and the user is not already a participant OR in the waitinglist table, we give them a simple link which will add them to the waitinglist table.

I recently finished writing an addition to the events system that will allow pa's etc to book places for people to events and then return at a later date to confirm the names. As far as I know, this is in progress for v2.3 but basically I need it now. Apart from some testing the system should work without too much trouble.

I've been working for the past few months with CiviCRM and despite the differences which came as a bit of a culture-shock to me, I've cobbled together a few ideas for things that perhaps could be considered for future versions.

Please bear in mind that these are simply things that I have had to add myself for a live contract and in no way reflects poorly on the CiviCRM system as it stands. On the contrary, I think the fundamental aspects of CiviCRM offer an easy way to add crm functionality to your site.

I'm hoping by posting this I can get a feel for how useful a Sage plugin and associated module for CiviCRM would be. We have a client that needs to have transactions from the various portions of CiviCRM that tend money to be recorded in their accounting package. I personally think it would be a great addition and being a client requirement, it has been factored into the costs.

There are several considerations as to how to approach this, I have thought of a good few ways of achieving the goal but I’d like if I may to ask for a little help fleshing out the details.