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.
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.
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".
On Thursday, June 4 2009 we had a CiviCRM meetup in NY. We set up this event via CiviEvent a couple of weeks prior to the event. Cynthia T managed to get us a room at the American Friends Service Committee building near Union Square. We filled up the 28 open slots for the event fairly quickly. We had a pretty good mixture of people. From experienced users to a folks who were just getting started with CiviCRM and wanted to learn more.
As cap10morgan noted in a recent blog, non-profits and open source solutions are a natural partnership. CiviCRM has been a fabulous gift to the organization that I lead, Trinity Episcopal Church. It allowed us to move from a FileMaker database accessible only to our office staff to a robust solution accessible to most of our membership.
On a daily basis, we get quite a few interesting bugs / feature requests either via the IRC Channel or via the forums.
Greetings and Salutations :-)
As some of you may already know, the existing "Greeting Type" feature in CiviCRM is pretty broken. You can't use it to specify a greeting for either email or printed / postal communications (no token or export support). In addition, as described in Tony Guzman's recent blog on Better Household Management - it's not designed to support a number of key use cases.
So... Tony and the folks at Dharmatech have been working with us to figure out a flexible WORKING solution which can handle the simple cases ("Dear Dave") as well as the more complex cases ("Dear Dave and Bob", "The Honorable Scout Conberg", etc.). If you haven't read Tony's blog yet - start with the Greetings and Salutations section there. Then, if this is an issue that affects you - check out the details of the proposed implementation in the issue tracker.
Folks gathered this past Monday evening for the first-ever San Francisco CiviCRM Meetup. We had a decent turnout - especially given the short notice (we wanted to squeeze this in before our India colleagues had to return to Mumbai).
We started with the usual introductory rounds - nice mix of backgrounds ranging from CiviCRM newbies to experienced users and consultants. Tomasz Finc from the WikiMedia Foundation then gave an awesome presentation about how they are using CiviCRM for fundraising and donor management. (Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit which operates Wikipedia along with a number of other projects dedicated to creating and supporting collaboratively edited reference projects.)
