One of the reported shortcomings of CiviCRM has been the perceived "lack of reporting functionality". This is true to a large extent, but our hope was that most folks would either use
Traditional reporting solutions: BIRT, Jasper Reports and/or Crystal Reports. We demoed an integration with BIRT a few releases back, but this did not get any traction. There are a couple of larger deployments that have built custom reports using BIRT and Jasper.
Views2 and CiviCRM integration. However the lack of grouping / sub-total functionality has prevented this from being a complete reporting solution. This is also a drupal only solution
Custom Drupal modules / Joomla components. Quite a few folks have gone down this path, but there has not been a lot of sharing of these reports within the community
Based on the success of Custom Search, we decided that shipping CiviCRM with a few good reports was a good goal for 2.3. This initiated CiviReport - The Return. The goal was to build a simple code based reporting framework that we could use to write reports fairly quickly. The same interface would be exposed so other developers could contribute their custom reports to core (in a manner similar to custom search).
Blogs
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May 8, 2009
By hallman Filed under CiviCRMI've combined my notes from the CiviCRM affinity group meeting and the user meeting and added notes from one conference session. In general, there were more people at the affinity group meeting this year than last year, more sessions that included CiviCRM, and I sensed more enthusiasm for CiviCRM. (One person told me she had been to the affinity group meeting and will be using CiviCRM.)
CiviCRM Affinity Group Meeting, April 26, 2009, at the NTEN conference, San Francisco, about 56 people
May 7, 2009
By jalama Filed under CiviEvent, CiviCRMAt the Developer camps on the 28th and 29th of April, 2009 (ie last week) one of the major tracks for all the breakout sessions was usability. Which is a major theme of the 2.3 version upgrade. In two of the groups I participated in we talked about the usability of the CiviEvent module from a an administrators perspective. One frustration that we decided need addressed was the 5 step wizard to create an event.
May 7, 2009
By michal Filed under CiviCRM, DocumentationThird day behind, pages count is 148 and raising. Actually, if we consider final format (size of pages) of the book, it would have 215 pages right now, but I'm using the count from temporarily generated PDF for sake of consistency with previous page count announcements from blog posts on day 1 and 2.
May 6, 2009
By lobo Filed under CiviCRMWe had a CiviCRM developer Camp on April 29th and 30th at Mitchell Kapor Foundation in downtown San Francisco. This was our largest developer camp with approx 25 attendees and 6 folks from the core team (Dave, Kurund, Deepak, Michal, Yashodha and me).
May 6, 2009
By michal Filed under CiviCRM, DocumentationSecond day of the sprint behind - manual pages count is now 117. We started at 9am as day before and continued writing until lunch. When we were sleeping, our off-site editor Andy came through a few chapters and introduced quite a lot of propositions, remarks and edits - so it was not only writing new text, but also integrating fixes to whatever was written so far. Second day was also the first one when off-site authors started contributing their chunks of text to the book.
May 5, 2009
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM, Drupal
The CiviCRM team is planning to hold a UK and Europe developer camp and user meetup in the last week of June 23-27 (if you are interested in attending, please do take this survey.)
A couple of months ago, we decided to run CiviCRM on the civicrm.org servers. Eating your own dog food does spur quite a bit of changes and tweaks to make the product a lot more usable :). For the event in the UK, we needed to accept payment in either euros or pounds. However we do not have multi-currency support within CiviEvent :(
Once again, Drupal hooks and custom templates to the rescue. I implemented two hooks, the buildForm hook to set the currency in the config object
May 5, 2009
By michal Filed under CiviCRM, DocumentationWow - to me personally, the first day of Book Sprint was quite a surprise. I knew there is a really cool and knowledgeable group of people here, and I also knew that getting away from everyday work really helps with focusing, but I just couldn't guess how productive this day will be.
May 4, 2009
By michal Filed under CiviCRM, DocumentationLong awaited day came - a bunch of good folks from CiviCRM Community arrived to Truckee to work on CiviCRM book! Some of us have been hanging out in San Francisco for some time already, attending NTEN and CiviCRM Developer and User Meetups, some of us arrived only today. First item of business was finalising book outline so that we can be ready to do actual writing on Monday morning.
May 3, 2009
By lcdweb Filed under JoomlaGoogle has once again continued their commitment to open source technology through the annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. The program runs from April through September and awards students a stipend for working on and completing qualified open source projects.
