Blogs

As we’re closer and closer to the release of CiviCRM 3.1, we began thinking what to schedule in CiviCRM 3.2. As one of the features we want to add is the ability to undelete certain CiviCRM entities, we want to discuss with the community the initial approach to undelete that we came up with – along with a sketch of logging functionality that we consider for a future release.

General Remarks

We are working with PTP and Dharmatech to incorporate their work on Canvass and Phonebank into CiviCRM v3.1. Initially we plan to package and release this as the civicrm_canvass drupal module As part of this work, we need to "extend" the core demographic information in a seamless manner. CiviCRM holds the gender / birth date / deceased date as core fields. However PTP also wanted to collect additional demographic information: ethnicity, primary language, secondary language and number of kids. We plan on storing this additinal demographic data as a custom group. We had to inject this custom group into the demographic section for the contact view and edit forms. We also wanted to hide the custom group showing up as a tabbed pane in the contact view screen. We accomplished all this using the all powerful and mighty hook system. We could inject a complete custom group into the edit field by implementing the buildForm hook and using some internal CiviCRM functions

I am member of the Massachusetts state legislature. I represent 40,000 people, 25,000 of whom are registered voters. I run for re-election every two years. During the non-campaign seasons, my small (one-paid staff plus volunteers) legislative office handles an average of roughly 30 email conversations and roughly 5 new constituents per day. We work on a range of constituent and legislative issues and I run an issues discussion website based on Wordpress at willbrownsberger.com.

Some of you'll are aware of the work i've done for The San Francisco School using Drupal 6.x / CiviCRM 2.2. You can read more technical details about this project on my blog. Database Maintain name/email/phone/address information for people associated with the school (students, staff and parents) Maintain relationships between parents and their children Maintain relationships between a teacher / advisor and their students Current Features deployed at SFS Give all parents and staff a login/password Online signups for all Parent Teacher Conferences Online signups for all extended care activity (classes after school) Sign-in / Sign-out for students attending extended care Computation of how many "activity" blocks a student has spent on extended care Parent viewing of the various extended care activities their kids have attended in the past Online maps of "Where we Live" of the school families Online directories of the schools and grades.

The first BETA release of version 3.1 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember it’s a beta release and it shouldn’t be used on production sites.

This is a continuing series of blog posts on deploying CiviCRM at San Francisco School. In the previous blog posts we discussed how to expose relationship information in a profile and how to manage parent teacher conferences. There are also some slides explaining the module from a recent training seminar Our latest project was automating the extended care (classes before and after school) system. The previous process was quite manual and labor intensive (and error prone). The attendance sheet was printed (via a CiviReport) from the students signed in. The students queued up and were signed into the extended care program. Some of the students had to be manually written in (if they were not signed up). At the end of the day, the parents would pick up the child and locate the childs name in the multiple sheets and sign them out. Typically 10-20% of parents would not sign their children out. The business office would then take this piece of paper and then calculate the "activity blocks" (based on time spent in extended care) and enter them in an excel spreadsheet. There were a few exceptions to the rule (children of staff, students who signed up for unlimited extended care and some activities are free)

A passionate posse of folks interested in advancing the state of non-profit software gathered this week at the Non-profit Software Development Summit. CiviCRM was a sponsor of the event which featured a full "track" of Civi-related events. Some civ-highlights from the conference: Helping some current users solve problems and get up to speed on more advance features in the CiviCRM 201 session. Our community does pretty amazing things in the "cloud" - but I really love having opportunities to interact with users and integrators and developers "live and in person". The feedback on 3.0 usability improvements (especially the new navigation menu) was super positive and very gratifying. Participating in Lobo's "action-packed" 60 minute session on Extending CiviCRM without Hacking Core. The more I play with all the things that can be done with our evolving hook functionality - the more excited I get. Joining with a group of CiviCRM integrators (and a few users) to brainstorm about Building the CiviCRM Community. This session was organized by the folks at Dharmatech - and partly inspired by a really cool book - The Art of Community - written by Jono Bacon who is the community manager for Ubuntu (a popular open source operating system distribution based on Debian Linux). It was exciting to collaborate in thinking about how folks with different interests and skills can potentially contribute towards strengthening the CiviCRM community and accelerating adoption of the platform. If you're interested in the ongoing sustainability of CiviCRM - I would encourage you to read Jono's book and think about what "team" you can join and / or create. Thanks to Gunner and the team at Aspiration for organizing a great event!

We’re happy to announce that CiviCRM 3.1.alpha2 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember it’s an alpha release and it shouldn’t be used on production sites.

The past two days a group of us gathered at the Mitchell Kapor Foundation offices in downtown San Francisco for the first CiviCRM Test Sprint. Some of the highlights of the event were:

Introducing the concept of testing and our current framework for unit testing. CiviCRM uses PHPUnit for unit testing. We also use XDebug for code coverage. You can see the latest results of our testing here