Blog posts by Dave Greenberg

We are happy to announce that our 1.6 Alpha release is now available for preview and testing on our servers. We'd like to get as many folks trying out the new features as possible over the next week. This will help us move quickly to a downloadable Beta release - which is currently scheduled for November 29.

You can login to the sandbox at:

http://sandbox.trunk.civicrm.org

User - demo Password - demo

Highlights of the release - and things we especially like folks to try out are: * Ajax-based suggestive search in the Contact Search box (left column) * Dynamically loaded sections in Advanced Search and Contact View Screens

There's been a lively discussion on the mailing list about requirements for linking CMS (Drupal / Joomla) Users to CiviCRM contacts and handling contributions from both types of contacts. We recognize that there is still work needed to handle the variety of use cases out there - but we've made decent progress in the upcoming 1.6 release:

Closing in on the 1.6 release...

We made our goal for last week - reducing the existing queue items to 4! Most of the team has switched to unit testing mode. Each team member is taking on a group of Resolved issues from the master 1.6 queue and retesting the functionality. This has surfaced 2 new problems - bringing the total open count to 6 as of this morning.

In general, we are trying to make sure that a person other than the original assignee does the unit tests - so there is another set of eyes. After testing, team members are "signing off" on the issue by marking it Closed.

A common question on the mailing list has been about CiviCRM search, scalability and speed. Currently basic/advanced search has been designed to try to get as many matches as possible from your contact data. However trying to get as many matches as possible results in some major inefficiencies which does not work for data sets of reasonable size

Currently the default search does the following:

1. For any value typed in the name field, it searches the civicrm_contact table and the civicrm_email table. It connects the two tables using two LEFT JOIN's via the civicrm_location table. LEFT JOIN's are not very efficient sql operators

CiviCRM Forms and Wizards (multi-page forms) are based on PEAR's HTML_QuickForm_Controller. (QFC). QFC in turn is based on HTML_QuickForm (QF). It was easier for us to model a single form as a one page wizard, and hence all CiviCRM forms are instances of QFC

The basic Form object is CRM_Core_Form. All forms are derived from this class. Each derived class is expected to implement the following functions

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: