We've been hard at work implementing an online set of forms to collect family information for the school module. This is one of our final projects for the year and eliminates the tedious summer ritual for the admin staff of sending paper forms to the 200 school families and for the parent to fill out the same information every year. This also saves the admin staff from entering that same information into the SIS
We've built this work on the parent portal that we launched late last year. Parents can update information on themselves and their children anytime via their drupal account. The form is composed of 5 sub-forms:
Household Information: Name, Email, Phone and Address of the household. We currently support 2 household and 4 contacts. These are stored as CiviCRM contacts with a relationship link of type Parent / Child to the student. We created a custom group to store which household a parent belonged to. We did not use CiviCRM's household functionality.
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A couple month ago I raised the question about CiviCRM importing scalability, and received mixed answers.
CiviCRM should be mostly used for data import, not for data cleaning. Most importing scalability issues stem from people's reliance on the system to perform both data clean up and import. CiviCRM has a great data cleaning process that should be taken advantage of when doing a large import.Folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are currently evaluating options for replacing their current suite of online tools. Their requirements include membership management, fundraising, email blasts and activism - and they would like to use open source solutions if possible (and they are already using Drupal for parts of their web presence). Their team has spent some time exploring CiviCRM's feature set, and Lobo and I met with them last week to discuss their findings, answer questions and evaluate fit and gaps.
I am writing this post to take community feedback on porting CiviCRM to PostgreSQL, the best way to do it, and to team up with any possible members willing to contribute to this effort. Here are my efforts until now. I have not been able to make it 'all' work on PostgreSQL, but certainly to a degree where I can see light at the end of the long tunnel. I am linking 3 PostgreSQL compatible files here:
structure.sql - this has the columns, primary keys, indexes, unique constraints data.sql - this is the sample data included with CiviCRM
So, amongst all the discussion of import methods lately I just wanted to flag another possible approach - creating a CiviCRM hook module for the Drupal migrate module
There are a bunch of great blogs out there on how to use the table wizard module with the migrate module to import data from various mysql tables or views into Drupal nodes / users / taxonomies / content types - for example:
http://www.lullabot.com/articles/drupal-data-imports-migrate-and-table-wizard
The migrate module has a bunch of hooks to allow you to use it for other forms of migrations. I rattled up the module / code pasted at the end of this blog in a couple of hours as a proof of content for using this approach to CiviCRM imports. The code I threw together just offers up civicrm_contact table fields but I think there must be some clever ways to use existing import tools rather than this rudimentary approach.
The team is excited to announce that the first public ALPHA release of version 3.2 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember this is an ALPHA release and it should NOT be used on production sites.
As of now (version 3.1.5), CiviCRM limits finding and merging of duplicate records to users with the "Administer CiviCRM" permission. A recent thread on the forums points out that some organizations will want to allow that privilege to non-administrative users. Having a need for this myself, I'm looking for the best way to do it. If a reasonable solution can be found, I'm hoping the changes will make it into core at some point in the future.
A while ago I mentioned that I was finding the backup and migrate module a better option to syncing Civi installs that the Civi drush command and Lobo asked if I would do a write-up on it.
I'm going to keep this pretty brief but I think it is worth telling people about as I find it really quick & easy.
http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate (AKA BAM)
The next phase of the CiviSchool project is collecting and maintaining all parent / student information online. This avoids the annual filling out forms work by the parents, and also the stuffing of envelopes by school staff during the summer and reentering all the information in the SIS when school starts.
We(NET Tuesday Taiwan) have a CiviCRM workshop since last August and had meetups for about 6-7 times. After Jimmy Huang came from CiviCon/Translation Sprint, we had a review meetup at 5/15 and gathered about 40 people from local NGOs.
What's the next? Due to limited resource, I think we need have 2~3 successful local case studies and empower ourselves to better support local NGOS.
presentation
