Blogues

The Drupal Views module has some pretty cool functionality. Views 2 fixed the "everything is a node" concept from Views 1, this enables integration with CiviCRM (which does nothing with nodes). A concise description of Views from its project page: This tool is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. CiviCRM profiles (in view/search mode) behaves like views. However it is not a flexible or configurable as views is for the end user. Integrating with views also allows the potential of integrating CiviCRM information with other Drupal specific information. e.g. Contact information on folks who are most active on your blog / forum / comments I took user.views.inc as a model and started hacking away to create civicrm.views.inc. You can get a copy of that file from our svn respository. So far its quite simple and just integrates the civicrm_contact and civicrm_email tables. I hope to add the phone/address fields in the next couple of hours/days and get a better idea of how to potentially generalize it.

We made few changes to default settings for New dedupe Now default dedupe rules settings are as follows

Fuzzy Rules for

Individual => First Name AND Last Name AND Email Organization => Organization Name OR Email Household => Household Name OR Email

Strict Rules for

Individual => Email Organization => Organization Name OR Email Household => Household Name OR Email

Thanks to the folks who expressed interest in attending a CiviCRM Boot Camp in Philadelphia this summer. Unfortunately we didn't get a sufficient number of signups to justify the expense of running the session (given that we'd be covering airfare, housing expenses etc.) - so we are forced to cancel the session.

From a forum post by Chris Burgess (with Green Party NZ). A related blog post is: Another approach to ACL and permissioning for hierarchical organizations Our (Drupal5+CiviCRM2.0) site needed a regional ACL implementation in order to give us the ability to easily grant access for our internal staff to contacts in their geographic region. Because we have staff at a provincial, regional and branch level, we needed to be able to configure permissions for each level. We did this by implementing code which overrides the ACL implementation in CiviCRM. I'd appreciate any input and suggestions on our methodology - it's a work in progress, but it's working well for us so far.

CiviEvent is one of the more popular components in CiviCRM (followed by CiviContribute, CiviMember and CiviMail). We have improved CiviEvent significantly in the past few releases and more improvements are slated for CiviEvent in v2.1. With this increased usage, we've seen more folks using Price Sets. Briefly, price sets gives admins the option to break an event into smaller pieces and charge for each selected piece. Price Sets was one of the first significant of code contributions to CiviCRM (thanx to Ideal Solutions and Marshal Newrock). We were planning to restructure this code in 2.2, but there were two missing features which came up a few times with some of our 'regular' users. The first missing feature was that two options in a price set item could not have the same amount. In order to include meals on multiple days with the same price, you would have to separate them into different items. Price Sets did not allow an amount of 0 either in an option. Fixing this was relatively easy, we just shuffled around a few fields that we used in the civicrm_option_value table to fix the above problems.

The Google Chart API is so simple yet so powerful that can give you some amazing features: Create charts simply by using URL with some parameters Inserting the chart is as simple as you would be inserting an image The chart is created on the fly dynamically No need of server side coding No need of JavaScript to code or view your chart Any resolution of the chart with only a change in URL parameters

If you were thinking of participating in the proposed Philadelphia Boot Camp, tomorrow is your last day to let us know (by sending an email to me - dave at civicrm dot org). We are still a few folks short of the number we need to run the camp - so if we don't hear from you tomorrow - we'll have to cancel this session. We're still planning to hold another camp in the fall on the West Coast - details to follow - but feel free to drop me an email if you're interested in that session.