Blogs

The nice thing about developing software is that the work is never done. There are so many cool things that we can do to make CiviCRM a better application. I've been having some pretty good conversations with David Strauss of Four Kitchen Studios on our IRC channel (#civicrm at irc.freenode.net). Four Kitchen Studios has been a great resource for CiviCRM and were instrumental in deploying CiviCRM within Wikipedia. In the recent past, David has initiated the de-dupe and contact merge algorithm which we hope to incorporate in CiviCRM v1.8.

Some of the various things that we hope to be part of v2.0. We will use a fair amount of the design and code from the v1.x series, but at the same time make significant changes when needed.

CiviCRM v1.7 is proceeding at a good pace. We've closed most of the issues with just a couple that are still open. We've also got a public sandbox that the community can use and test out various features of v1.7. Hopefully this will also allow us to collect a few more bug reports and issues. We definitely would like to see the community step up and play a more crucial role with testing the product before the beta and final release.

If things continue at this pace, I suspect we'll push out a beta candidate mid next week. At that point, we'll also switch demo to using CiviCRM v1.7 and make v1.7 the default download. In the past this has enabled us to catch a few more issues before we do a final release.

Came across this on digg today:

How Open Source Projects Survive Poisionous People (and you can too). If you are interested in open source development, building and fostering a developer community, this video is definitely worth watching. We in CiviCRM land can learn quite a few things from this video. I dont think this is a problem with CiviCRM land currently, but its nice to hear about some tips on how to structure email conversations etc. I think we have a really awesome community and the video has some good tips on managing a project etc

I've installed and am running Zend Platform 3.0.0 on my MacBook. I'm quite pleased with the stability and reliability of the platform. have not done any major testing regarding the speed increase, but I suspect its not noticeable since the machine is not very loaded and already quite responsive

Zend has introduced a new developer license scheme, where you can run Zend Platform for free on your development box. This is quite good for us since we dont have to pay for it. However there are two minor things that are annoying:

I've been spending the past few days with Eclipse and BIRT. Their examples and screencasts are quite valuable to understanding a fairly complex application. I suspect this model of documentation is quite applicable to CiviCRM also.

I'm making pretty good progress with CiviReport and currently have a BIRT library with various reports that can be distributed. I'm focusing on CiviContribute for the initial set of reports, but it is quite easy to adapt the reports to CiviMember and CiviEvent. BIRT allows you to have drill down reports (i.e. from a high level report, you can get more detailed reports on various aspects by drilling down a level or two). Thus a top level contribution report could give you breakdown by year, state and your top 5 donors. You can then drill down into details for each year, or state or a more detailed contribution report on a donor.

Thanx to our colleagues from PicNet, we've had support for Joomla! since CiviCRM v1.1. Joomla! is a fairly popular open source CMS and seems to have a significantly larger user base than Drupal. Unfortunately Joomla! does not make it easy to extend some core functionality like Drupal. Hence, CiviCRM on Joomla! lacks a few very important features.

We were hoping that Joomla! 1.5 would address these issues, but that did not happen. At the same time our user base on Joomla is growing quite nicely. Our download stats now indicate that the php4 version of joomla is the most downloaded tarball. The Joomla Extensions site is a close third on our referrals to civicrm.org after google and drupal. If you are a CiviCRM user on Joomla!, please do take the time to review and rate us on the Joomla extensions site.

We did manage to hit the code freeze and branch date of Feb 26th. v1.7 is now off and living in its own branch. If you are using svn to get the latest version of the code base, make sure you switch to the v1.7 branch (svn switch is a useful command)

From our friends at CivicActions comes the Draft Al Gore site using Drupal and CiviCRM. They use a pretty nifty thermometer module to track the amount of money coming in via CiviContribute.