Blogues

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

This is what worked for me using Control Panel, FTP, File Manager and PHPMyAdmin.

Before you begin make sure you have a working Drupal 4.7 already installed. Have the name of the database, database user and password handy as well as the name of your mysql host. If you can’t find the name of your mysql host anywhere on your host’s site then your mysql host is probably localhost. Save yourself the aggravation and get all these things written down beside you before you even start installing CiviCRM.

1. Use FTP to upload the zip/tar CiviCRM directly into the drupal/modules folder.

2. Go to your Control Panel or whatever method you use to create new databases and create a new database called civicrm. You will already have a database user name and password from your Drupal installation. Go to your list of database users and add a user to the new civicrm database you just created. Make sure to give the user full privileges.

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:

We made excellent progress on our 1.6 queue last week. All but one of the issues targeted have been moved into resolved status. The queue is now down to 12 items (from 23 last week). Some team members will be moving into active QA mode this week - doing regression testing on the 1.6 resolved queue to verify that things haven't gotten broken since they were resolved earlier in the release cycle.

For the coming week we'll try to get the queue down to 5 issues or less... and finish the following larger issues:

Over the next few weeks, I will blog about the architecture of CiviCRM and some basic principles that we follow in the design/coding phase. In this series I’ll also talk about how we integrate with Drupal/Joomla and the scalability/performance/memory bottlenecks in CiviCRM.

CiviCRM is built on top of some incredibly powerful open source toolkits. They include:

It's been almost 2 wonderful years that I have been working on CiviCRM project, since we started development in India. From then things have changed. We started with a single file, (I think it was CRUD.php) which no longer exists :). What excites me the most about CiviCRM is the challenges that we face in implementing new features and the opportunity to work on advanced technologies. The scope is simply unlimited...

CiviCRM is not just another software, it is driven by the needs of the community, which makes this project very special to me. Since this software has also simultaneously been developed in US and Poland, makes it global in nature. This project has been crafted meticulously, so that there is a lot of scope for extensibility and it can be tailor-made to suit the requirements of host of organizations and non-profits. A lot of credit needs be given to the pioneers of this project, who are harbingers of the today's IT Industry.