Blogues

One of our major goals for this year is to optimize CiviCRM to handle load in a graceful manner. This is extremely important for us with the Branner Project.

One of the most frequently asked questions on the CiviCRM dev list is for help with installing CiviCRM. Most of the questions are quite similar, although each of them seems to have their own specific twist. We do agree that installing CiviCRM is not for the faint-hearted and it takes a fair amount of skill to get it up and running the first time.

CiviMail, described in general previously, is our component for mass-mailing the CiviCRM contacts. In this entry, we’d like to get a bit more into the details on how CiviMail exactly works ‘under the hood’.

Recipients List Building

Don't worry, the body is not as dire as the subject indicates. Just wanted to give folks some background about how we operate and manage to do what we do, and what we need to do to continue delivering an awesome product (or so we think ...)

We currently are spread across India (9 developers), Poland (1.5 developers), US (dave) and NZ (lobo).

Now that 1.6 beta has been released - it's time to look ahead and prioritize the NEXT release (1.7).

There are a few "big features" we're targeting:

... and a number of smaller but significant feature candidates.

As some of you are aware our development team is fairly distributed. We have developers in Mumbai - India, Warsaw - Poland and San Francisco - US. Effective next week, we will have a presence in Nelson - New Zealand. I'm moving to NZ for 9 months and am looking forward to it. You could follow our adventures on my newly created personal blog. If there are any CiviCRM'ers / Drupal'ers in the Nelson area, would be great to form a co-working space, join forces and spread the open source paradigm with organizations in that area.

Dave Greenberg will also be on vacation for a large part of December. We are pretty confident that the rest of the team will do a great job of keeping the project and community moving forward at our normal blistering pace. Feel free to keep them busy and on their toes with a constant supply of feature requests, bug reports and installation issues :)

For folks downloading the latest code from the svn repository, we have branched the v1.6 code base. The main trunk is now be focussed on v1.7 development and is considered unstable. Please do an svn switch in your directory

$ svn switch http://svn.civicrm.org/branches/v1.6

It was a pretty productive thanksgiving weekend :) Learnt way more about reporting, how complex an issue it is and the number of companies that are built on reporting (or to use a more trendy phrase, Business Intelligence). So here are some conclusions:

We've posted a draft specification for CiviEvent (phase 1) on the wiki. We are actively soliciting community feedback prior to finalizing the specifications on or around December 7. If you are interested in an integrated Event Management component for CiviCRM - please review the spec carefully and post your feedback and questions as comments on the wiki. We are targeting this for the 1.7 release.

This specification reflects feedback and suggestions from many folks in the CiviCRM and Drupal communities. We'd like to especially thank and acknowledge Jeff Porter of The Foundation for Prader-Willi Research, and Dan Robinson of CivicActions for their extensive contributions.