Blogs

We now move onto the more interesting stuff of what really happens when a request is made and the objects that are responsible for building the response. The top level CiviCRM objects are:

CiviCRM uses the PEAR package DB_DataObject to access the mysql database. Doing so reduces the amount of sql we need to write to fetch / store values for a single table. For queries involving more than one table, we write them manually since since it was fairly painful to try to force complicated queries using DB_DataObject (we did use DB_DO for multiple table queries when we wrote EmailNow, in the end we felt the hoops we had to jump through was not worth the effort and hence the current scheme)

The basic PHP classes that represent a table are called DAO's (Data Access Objects). These are generated automatically by (xml/GenCode.php) which also generates the sql structure for that specific table. The xml files representing the schema is stored under CIVCRM_ROOT/xml/schema. The sql file generated (civicrm_41.mysql and civicrm_40.mysql) are stored under CIVICRM_ROOT/sql (note that the generated files are not present in the svn repository). The DAO files are stored under CIVICRM_ROOT/CRM/Core/DAO (and under appropriate directories based on what table it is, this is configured in the xml representation.

here is a tentative schedule for CiviCRM v1.6. The feature list for v1.6 is here. As all good open source software projects, the below schedule is subject to change :)

Make sure you read the Introduction Chapter of this series for a better understanding of the below. Developers might be interested in installing CiviCRM from our svn repository

Some of the important directories under CiviCRM svn root are:

We made excellent progress on our 1.6 queue last week. All but one of the issues targeted have been moved into resolved status. The queue is now down to 12 items (from 23 last week). Some team members will be moving into active QA mode this week - doing regression testing on the 1.6 resolved queue to verify that things haven't gotten broken since they were resolved earlier in the release cycle.

For the coming week we'll try to get the queue down to 5 issues or less... and finish the following larger issues:

Over the next few weeks, I will blog about the architecture of CiviCRM and some basic principles that we follow in the design/coding phase. In this series I’ll also talk about how we integrate with Drupal/Joomla and the scalability/performance/memory bottlenecks in CiviCRM.

CiviCRM is built on top of some incredibly powerful open source toolkits. They include:

It's been almost 2 wonderful years that I have been working on CiviCRM project, since we started development in India. From then things have changed. We started with a single file, (I think it was CRUD.php) which no longer exists :). What excites me the most about CiviCRM is the challenges that we face in implementing new features and the opportunity to work on advanced technologies. The scope is simply unlimited...

CiviCRM is not just another software, it is driven by the needs of the community, which makes this project very special to me. Since this software has also simultaneously been developed in US and Poland, makes it global in nature. This project has been crafted meticulously, so that there is a lot of scope for extensibility and it can be tailor-made to suit the requirements of host of organizations and non-profits. A lot of credit needs be given to the pioneers of this project, who are harbingers of the today's IT Industry.

So this week, our focus has been on getting some cool new features into CiviCRM v1.6. We figured that we'd take some baby steps into the wide world of web 2.0 and ajax and use Dojo as our toolkit of choice.

Yes we do know that Drupal chose JQuery and Joomla v1.5 has a combination of a few different ajax utilities. However, we did like the direction Dojo was moving in with a fairly nice large community along with some of the big names in the industry (IBM, Sun etc). We also did meet Alex Russell, one of the lead developers/architects and its always a good practice to use tools from folks you know :) (since u can then pester them if you need help at some stage)

We made decent progress on our 1.6 queue last week. Some of the issues we targeted for resolution are still in progress, but the queue is now down to 23 items (from 39 last week).

For the coming week we'll try to get the queue down to around 10 issues and resolve the following larger issues:

Another feature that we worked on this week was integrating the "standard" version of PayPal as an additional payment option for CiviContribute. We waited for quite a few months for PayPal (or Google) to release a nice web 2.0 api for subscriptions / recurring transactions, but that did not seem to be happening. So we took the plunge and decided to implement PayPal Web Standards as the first step towards implementing PayPal Subscriptions (basically recurring donations)

PayPal has done an incredible job of documenting their API's and making the integration fairly easy. It helped that the Drupal e-commerce package has this feature, so we could peek into their code base and figure out how to do a few things. Getting a system up and working using the sandbox makes development so much easier, since the sandbox behaves identically to the live system. I was pleasantly surprised to see that we did not have to write a lot of code for this case, but primarily had to rearrange and cleanup the existing code to handle the synchronous (SOAP api) vs the asynchronous (IPN) implementation.