Blogues

I've been spending the past few days with Eclipse and BIRT. Their examples and screencasts are quite valuable to understanding a fairly complex application. I suspect this model of documentation is quite applicable to CiviCRM also.

I'm making pretty good progress with CiviReport and currently have a BIRT library with various reports that can be distributed. I'm focusing on CiviContribute for the initial set of reports, but it is quite easy to adapt the reports to CiviMember and CiviEvent. BIRT allows you to have drill down reports (i.e. from a high level report, you can get more detailed reports on various aspects by drilling down a level or two). Thus a top level contribution report could give you breakdown by year, state and your top 5 donors. You can then drill down into details for each year, or state or a more detailed contribution report on a donor.

Thanx to our colleagues from PicNet, we've had support for Joomla! since CiviCRM v1.1. Joomla! is a fairly popular open source CMS and seems to have a significantly larger user base than Drupal. Unfortunately Joomla! does not make it easy to extend some core functionality like Drupal. Hence, CiviCRM on Joomla! lacks a few very important features.

We were hoping that Joomla! 1.5 would address these issues, but that did not happen. At the same time our user base on Joomla is growing quite nicely. Our download stats now indicate that the php4 version of joomla is the most downloaded tarball. The Joomla Extensions site is a close third on our referrals to civicrm.org after google and drupal. If you are a CiviCRM user on Joomla!, please do take the time to review and rate us on the Joomla extensions site.

We did manage to hit the code freeze and branch date of Feb 26th. v1.7 is now off and living in its own branch. If you are using svn to get the latest version of the code base, make sure you switch to the v1.7 branch (svn switch is a useful command)

From our friends at CivicActions comes the Draft Al Gore site using Drupal and CiviCRM. They use a pretty nifty thermometer module to track the amount of money coming in via CiviContribute.

It's been a while, i was trying to get Eclipse-BIRT working on my machine (Ubuntu Edgy). Finally got success few days back.

Here are the steps for installation:

1) Get the Eclipse using Ubuntu update manager.

sudo aptitude install eclipse

2) BIRT package is not installed by default in Eclipse. So use Eclipse update manager and select package BIRT Reporting Tool.

You might get few errors: - Could not write in /usr/lib .....

chmod -R 777 /usr/lib/eclipse

- I also got following errors: Requested operation cannot be performed because it would invalidate the current configuration. See details for more information.

I just finished implementing some cool features for customizing CiviCRM look and feel in v1.7. As most of you'll are aware CiviCRM follows a pretty good modular MVC (model-view-controller) architecture. We seperate the view (Smarty templates) from the code and business logic quite stringently and most of the display can be customized at the template level.