This is my second blog on the topic of integrating with CiviCRM with an accounting system. Those of you who haven't just run screaming from the room or suddenly discovered an urgent need to polish the inside of your car exhaust, re-organise your tupperware or push needles into your eyes ... read on.
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.
One of the areas that occasionally hits the forums is whether CiviCRM integrates with accounting systems. I've been giving a little thought to accounts integration lately and have now spent a bit of time poking around the Xero API and thinking about what I would do if I were to spent time trying to get CiviCRM talking to Xero. The content of this blog is mostly non-technical so if you can safely ignore the stuff about APIs if it doesn't mean anything to you.
I'm working on deploying CiviCRM for my kids school website. Part of the project requires us to expose the parent <-> child relationship information on the website and allow parents to edit their child information.
I accomplished this using a combination of civicrm hooks, custom templates, permissioned relationships and custom code in a drupal module. You can access the module and template code here.
The broad steps are:
Implement hook_civicrm_pageRun for the profile view page (CRM_Profile_Page_Dynamic). Only implement this hook for the specific profile id's you want relationship information. In this case we have two profiles, a Parent Profile (gid=3) and a Student Profile (gid=4)
The pageRun hook also adds the module's template directory to the smarty include path, so we dont have to set it globally. This also allow multiple modules to append different template directories to the template include path (check the function _sfschool_initialize)
The hook gets either the parent or the child information using a custom query. We ensure that only permissioned parents can see their child information (in case of some complicated family structures). The queries are relatively simple at this stage, i suspect they will increase in complexity over the next few weeks
The hook exposes the information gathered from the database to the smarty template
The custom template (templates/CRM/Profile/Page/3/Dynamic.tpl) uses that information to display the relationship data on the page. I also edited the View.tpl template to eliminate the "Back to Listings" link.
Yes, first item of business - the official announcement of news that has been showing up here and there already. The upcoming release, that was previously referred to as 2.3 has been renamed to 3.0. :-) After long discussions we decided that the return of CiviReport, together with many other changes and improvements that have been introduced in this release deserve a major version number.
Currently Joomla + CiviCRM is great combination, except for a key missing feature: The ability to control the authorization rules for who can see what. ( Otherwise known as ACL )
To donate to this cause, visit the link: http://www.fundable.com/groupactions/groupaction.2009-07-21.7920489394
Is it to much to ask that only the bookeeper can see the money? Currently anyone with access to the "Components" menu in the back-end of Joomla can see everything.
Some recent discussions and debates about Active Record and Data Mapper have popped up in the context of new architectural proposals for CiviCRM from Dharmatech and raSANTIAGO. We think it is important that the differences between each is known and to clarify what are some erroneous perceptions. This is not to claim that either design pattern is above criticism. It is to say, that there are some misperceptions that prevent a more intelligent discussion of the trade-offs between these two design patterns. Our hope is to bring some clarity to this discussion.
Current CiviCRM architecture pitfalls
rasantiago has proposed a new CiviCRM architecture with details of the ORM layer. Torenware commented on the latter and mentioned some particular scalability issues. Our own experience with the Active Record design pattern proposed by rasantiago is that it works well for small projects but doesn't scale well. We believe that CiviCRM is now facing serious scaling problems in several areas, to wit:
You might want to display more information that those that are assigned by default in the template. My goal was to have a simple way of retrieving more information from civicrm than the ones available in the template, without having to modify the php code .
For instance, I used it to display all the employees of an organisation from the profile that displays the organisation, or to display a list ofother contacts that live in the same country than the contact you're viewing.
In London in the last training, we discussed about displaying the activities directly in the contact summary tab for instance.
I attended a one day user camp in London, UK last Thursday. The experience level ranged from people wanting to know more about CiviCRM and if it would be a good fit for their organization, to people who have decided to use it and were now keen to get more training.
This is a follow up to our last post proposing a new architecture for CiviCRM. Much appreciation for everyone's patience. Following from our last post we want to go over the use of Doctrine, a PHP implementation of the Active Record design pattern made popular through Ruby on Rails. The Doctrine Project has done a great job of maintaining detailed documentation and has a lot of features that we believe everyone will find useful when working with CiviCRM objects. We have posted some of our working code for the new ORM and REST API here at git hub.We have given this code set the working name civiBASE.
