Here at raSANTIAGO we are entering our third year with CiviCRM and still find ourselves struggling to make desired changes to the codebase. Too often we have expressed desired to re-architect and re-factor the CiviCRM. Recently we have completed two major projects that had us deeper in the codebase then before and realizing that we had to stop complaining.
Blogues
Restez à l'affut des dernières nouvelles de CiviCRM avec les billets de blogue de développeurs et d'utilisateurs de partout dans le monde.
The Craigslist Foundation held their annual Non-profit Bootcamp this Saturday in Berkeley. This event brings together more than 1,500 people who are "passionate about changing the world". The opening keynote speaker was Arianna Huffington - who shared some wonderful stories about the importance of volunteering in improving our own lives along with the lives of folks we're helping.
I had the opportunity to participate in a panel on "Future Tech", along with Peter Deitz from Social Actions, Rayma Raghavan from YouTube, and Marnie Webb from Techsoup / NetSquared. Their was a nice turnout for the session (maybe 125+ folks). My goal was to get the audience excited about investigating open source tools by explaining the benefits of the open source model and the alignment between open source development and non-profit process and values. Of course I also spread the word about CiviCRM and some of the cool implementations folks are doing.
You can download my presentation slides from our wiki. Feel free to re-use, re-mix etc. :-) You can also read some more about our session, as well as some of the other happenings at the boot camp on Beth Kanter's blog.
Support desk blog: How to collect organization / household information via drupal's "My Account"
This blog post is courtesy of IRC user (huf, Mihaly Berenyi). The question is how do you get a permisioned user to edit organization information from the Drupal My Account Page. The answer surprising is quite simple :)
Create an organization profile and check "My Account" in the used for settings
Ensure that the user's relationship with the organization is permissioned, i.e. the user has the permission box checked to edit the organization
Apply the patch at the end of this post
I have two kids who started school late last year in San Francisco. I've been getting more involved with the school and their education and have been noticing the lack of open source software in most of the school operations. In the great open source tradition of scratching your own itch, this summer i'm looking at building a few modules. These seem applicable to a lot of schools and figured it might make more sense to do some research into whats available out there.
The team has released version 2.2.6 with approximately 35 bug fixes and improvements. Notable fixes and improvements include:
More CiviCRM - Views2 integration/fixes
Renew Membership fixes ( CRM-4555,CRM-4556 )
You can review a complete list of 2.2.6 changes on the issue tracker.
Download
You can download CiviCRM 2.2.6 at our download page. Select from the civicrm-stable section. The filenames include the 2.2.6 label: civicrm-2.2.…. Be sure and download the correct version for your CMS (Drupal / Joomla! / Standalone).
In my last blog post about multi-org, I made the case for merging groups and relationships as an elegant solution to the multi-organization data modeling requirements. My thinking boiled down to:
Groups represent a relationship between "you" (i.e. one of the owner organizations of that Civi instance) and a contact (i.e. a member, newsletter subscriber, media contact, alumni, etc.).
Relationships represent a relationship between 2 external contacts.
So, under multi-org there would be more than one "you" for the first scenario above, and I thought well, let's just piggyback on the existing many-to-many data model we have for relationships. However, this proved too drastic a change to make it into 2.3, so we (I and the core dev team) went back to the drawing board.
As mentioned previously, we’re introducing quite a few new CiviEvent features in CiviCRM 2.3. Most of them are still undergoing our internal CiviCRM QA cycle, but do check them out at our CiviCRM 2.3 sandbox if you’re interested (there is still time for some minor fixes to accommodate your use-cases!).
Waitlisting
Over the past few releases we've been drinking a fair amount of the hook kool-aid. This has proven to be super effective and gets around the problem of hacking the core files, but still allow a developer to extend the functionality of the system in minor/major ways. We've used hooks also to implement event discounts and contribution/event tracking.
This week on IRC we had a few more questions which were effectively solved using hooks.
How do you delete a contact when a drupal user is deleted
Tom (http://www.kirkdesigns.co.uk/) wanted to delete the civicrm contact if the drupal user was deleted. The solution was to implement hook_user that gets called before civicrm's hook_user (you can do this by ensuring that your module has a lower weight than civicrm.module). Use the api call civicrm_uf_id_get to get the contact id for a given drupal user id. This is followed by an api call to civicrm_contact_delete to delete the contact.
This month's Community Advisory Group phone conference focused on the usability improvements which are being implemented for the 2.3 release. The advisory group was responsible for making usability the top priority for this next release, and they've been quite involved throughout the 2.3 release cycle - identifying pain points, suggesting new approaches, and helping to prioritize the issues.
I had asked group members to review the key change areas and if possible also gather end-user feedback from users inside their organization or clients. Overall the feedback was quite positive - and we also got some excellent suggestions.
You can check out the meeting agenda here - including a list of areas we reviewed. I've also added a section listing some of the recommended changes from the group. We'll be posting detailed blogs on most of the key changes in the coming weeks.
This ongoing dialog with a consistent and committed group of users and consultants has been enormously helpful for the project.
I'm working on setting up a "CiviCRM Planet" feed aggregator similar to that which exists for drupal at http://drupal.org/planet. Please post a link to your blog's feed of CiviCRM related posts in the comments here. If you do not yet have a civicrm specific feed, I recommend creating a tag or taxonomy term specifically for items you which to appear on CiviCRM planet. Might I suggest "CiviCRM Planet" or just "CiviCRM".
