Make Gift Aid happen

Today at the Bristol Code sprint a few of us made a concerted effort on getting making Giftaid 'plug and play' for Civi.

Our starting point is code written by Millertech and our aim is to get it into a state that we can package it as a Drupal module.  Once we've done that, we're hopeful that we'll be able to package it for Joomla also.

We're having to make a few improvements to Civi's hooks, and some modifications to the existing functionality to enable us to package it up, but the benefits are obvious: much easier installation and thus wider uptake of the module, and thus higher CiviCRM adpotion in the UK :)

We spent most of the morning familiarising ourselves with the code and discussing the necessary changes we would need to make.  This threw up some difficult problems (I'll spare you the details) but the result was this outline of how we are implementing it.

While we were putting the finishing touches to our implementation plan, Lobo created a new drupal module for giftaid in Civi's tools repo.  Once he'd done that we checked it out and got to work.  If you're reading this because you want to know when this module will be available, feel free to skip the next para on what we did, otherwise ...

Rajesh from Millertech and Deepak worked on meeting Gift aid's reporting requirements with CiviCRM.  Dave J from Circle Interactive created custom data fields to hold the custom data for individuals and contributions.  Michael M (that's me) from Third Sector Design started on a profile to be used on contribution forms (we'll be using Lobo's super handy migration scripts to make these profiles and custom data automatically install with the module).  Once Dave J finished the custom data, he moved on to migrating the 'add to giftaid task' and some new code that our implementation required.

So we bit off a big bit of Gift aid today, but the task is not over.  We are still looking for more sponsorship to make this feature happen.  To this end, Dave M made a new Make it Happen page that we urge you to contribute to if you want to make this happen.

And then the sprint was over and it was time to get some fresh air and fish and chips at Cheddar Gorge, er, until we got back to the house and carried on sprinting ...