Blogues

If you're in the area, then come along to the first UK CiviCRM usergroup tomorrow at 4pm GMT. It's at Voluntary Action Westminster, 37 Chapel St, London, Greater London, NW1 5DP. Anyone using / developing / interested in CiviCRM as an ICT professional / non profit employee / volunteer, etc. is welcome to drop by, share success stories, talk through problems, work out how to collaborate better, and be part of future developments. We'll have Dave Greenberg joining us on Skype as the day starts in San Francisco (around 5 or 6pm our time). I'll report back here on how things went. After London, we plan on touring round the country a bit. Bristol and Manchester to start off. More information in this forum post. Hope you can join us tomorrow. Michael

Earlier today I had the pleasure of presenting and demonstrating CiviCRM to about 40 people working in the non-profit sector at Connecting Up 2008 (see http://www.connectingup.org)

This year's conference had a strong focus on the use of social media, and today's keynote speaker was Beth Kanter, who is well known as a trainer, blogger and consultant on how non-profits can make best use of social media (http://beth.typepad.com).

Case management is a central activity for a large number of non-profits and NGO's who are current or prospective users of CiviCRM. Basic support for defining cases as a grouping of activities with a "client" was added to CiviCRM 2.0 through the sponsorship of Frontline Defenders. Subsequently, interest has been growing for adding more comprehensive case management support to CiviCRM. Earlier this year Michelle Murrain of NOSI organized a lively discussion list which allowed folks to share ideas about requirements and use cases. Andrew Clarke, the Executive Director of The Physician Health Program of British Columbia (PHP-BC) was one of the participants in that discussion. PHP-BC provides "advocacy and support for physicians...who are experiencing problems related to personal and family emotional health issues..." They have been looking to replace their current data management system. Recognizing the potential of an open source solution that could both serve his organization's needs AND those of other human service organizations - Andrew advocated and obtained funding to partner with CiviCRM in designing and developing a CiviCase component.

So i've been looking a bit closely at performance for 2.1 (both database and usability) and am attempting to boost it up significantly compared to 2.0 (and prior). Here are some of the highlights We've introduced a new database cache table (civicrm_cache) to cache a few database queries that are repeated a lot. Some of the specific queries include listing all the fields available for the contact types (individual/org/household). This is a combination of the built-in fields (name, address etc) and the custom fields added by the user. This reduces the number of queries invoked from 5 complex queries to 1 simple cache query (and an un-serialize) We've added a column (group_type) to the profile table (civicrm_uf_group), so we know the profile type rather than recompute it every time we need it. Thanx to Dave Lange who reported and did some analysis on this, we've reduced the number of LOWER( dbColumnName) LIKE 'value' to skip the LOWER part. Email is now stored as lower case, so we can skip the LOWER part in all email comparison. In his tests, these have improved performance a fair bit Smart Groups Hierarchical Select Menu System DeDupe We will integrate the ACL changes into core either as a pluggable ACL architecture and/or via the hook system. Overall 2.1 is shaping up to be a significant improvement over 2.0 :). You can get more details on the 2.1 feature set and release schedule on the CiviCRM v2.1 wiki page.

One of the core features of CiviCRM is the ability to store a query as a group (smart group). This allows folks to create groups of contacts that share the same attribute(s). For e.g. A group of all the people in California. Thus contacts can be added/edited/deleted from the database, and the smart group will always give you all the contacts who live in CA at that point in time. I suspect this feature is heavily used by quite a few installs.

I'm on my way back to San Francisco after an incredibly stimulating three weeks of collaborating (and co-habitating) with fellow "Civi's". There were lots of very long days (12 - 15 hours) of brainstorming , designing, hammering out code... intermingled with cooking and eating some lovely meals together, a few cool adventures in the natural beauty of New Zealand, and some excellent meetups with members of the community "down-under". This was our fourth "international" team gathering. In planning for it we tried to build on the things that worked best in our prior meetups - and learn from things that didn't work as well. We decided to focus tightly on a few key goals / projects - and worked hard at staying on task. (This meant resisting the gravitational pulls of email, forums, team members not with us etc.) We set a schedule for moving through our projects and decided up front that it was ok to move on to the next task without completing 100% of the current one.

Today we spent a fair amount of time with Pete and Chris from the NZ greens. We got a pretty good overview of how the NZ Greens are using the system and some of their pain points. We saw some of the cool integration that Chris has done with the NZ voter database and linking the electorate ID to a CiviCRM contact ID, ability to merge the address from the voter database etc. Its kinda cool how folks can extend and integrate the systems with other db's and we need to make it significantly easier to enable folks to build such system within CiviCRM.

Time flies - it's been already a week since we've been together in New Zealand, enjoying face to face conversations and working together. My personal take on communication is that there is nothing like real time conversation involving two persons located in the same physical spot, so I must say I'm really enjoying this opportunity to hang out with Yashi, Dave, KJ & Lobo.