Blogues

So this week, our focus has been on getting some cool new features into CiviCRM v1.6. We figured that we'd take some baby steps into the wide world of web 2.0 and ajax and use Dojo as our toolkit of choice.

Yes we do know that Drupal chose JQuery and Joomla v1.5 has a combination of a few different ajax utilities. However, we did like the direction Dojo was moving in with a fairly nice large community along with some of the big names in the industry (IBM, Sun etc). We also did meet Alex Russell, one of the lead developers/architects and its always a good practice to use tools from folks you know :) (since u can then pester them if you need help at some stage)

We made decent progress on our 1.6 queue last week. Some of the issues we targeted for resolution are still in progress, but the queue is now down to 23 items (from 39 last week).

For the coming week we'll try to get the queue down to around 10 issues and resolve the following larger issues:

Another feature that we worked on this week was integrating the "standard" version of PayPal as an additional payment option for CiviContribute. We waited for quite a few months for PayPal (or Google) to release a nice web 2.0 api for subscriptions / recurring transactions, but that did not seem to be happening. So we took the plunge and decided to implement PayPal Web Standards as the first step towards implementing PayPal Subscriptions (basically recurring donations)

PayPal has done an incredible job of documenting their API's and making the integration fairly easy. It helped that the Drupal e-commerce package has this feature, so we could peek into their code base and figure out how to do a few things. Getting a system up and working using the sandbox makes development so much easier, since the sandbox behaves identically to the live system. I was pleasantly surprised to see that we did not have to write a lot of code for this case, but primarily had to rearrange and cleanup the existing code to handle the synchronous (SOAP api) vs the asynchronous (IPN) implementation.

We are just wrapping up our first implementation of access control lists (ACL) in CiviCRM (for v1.6). This gives us a framework for building fairly sophisticated access permissions into the data model and allowing fine granularity of who can view/edit/delete various sections of your contact database

Our first implementation replicates what we currently achieve with drupal's permissioning system. A CiviCRM admin can partition their contact database into multiple sections, and give view/edit access to different "roles". Integrating this into the core allows us to expose this functionality to our Joomla! users also. We do not use a matrix of checkboxes to present all potential combination, but rather present one "ACL" at a time. Obviously each method has its advantages/disadvantages, but the former is inherently non-scalable (as some of our friends in canada discovered when trying to partition their db into 300+ ridings), while the latter would probably need an external script to populate the database tables for significantly large sets of ACLs

We have been thinking it would be useful to share our team goals with the community on a regular basis - so folks have a clearer idea of what we're working on (without wading through the details in the Issue Tracker).

We currently have 39 open issues on the 1.6 queue - and we need to knock-off at least 10 next week in order to be on-track for 1.6 beta. Here's the issues we'd definitely like to resolve:

We've been working on the Branner Project and writing code to help analyze the applications and process them in a suitable manner. The application collects a fair amount of data across multiple pages and as such is not very conducive to reading on the web.

We wanted to analyze the data in Excel. The database is relational and hence hierarchical. CSV is not a great format for this purpose. So we wrote a CiviCRM -> XML converter and got all the data we needed in a nice easy to understand / parse xml. We then used a PEAR package (Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer) on windows to convert the xml to a set of excel worksheets. As part of this package we also included the contact_id, which allowed us to import results back into CiviCRM using the contact_id

CiviMail is a component that allows the users to create, send, track and manage CiviCRM-based mailings. In CiviCRM 1.5, CiviMail underwent speed and memory optimisations; in CiviCRM 1.6 we’re concentrating on usability improvements.

Last week was a pretty intense week for the team. The quest application process had the application deadline and as expected the load on the servers was really high for an extended period of time. As always we learnt quite a few lessons and a few things to do differently the next time around. Some of the lessons learnt include:

We've been polishing up a cool new 1.6 feature over the past few days - and I got pretty excited seeing it working with a real set of data. The feature is Batch Update Via Profile. It allows you to define a profile with (almost) any standard and custom fields and use that to display a table for updating many contacts at once.

For example, if you want input hard-copy responses from a mailer for a group of contacts...You could define a profile with the fields you want to update. Then use Find Contacts to retrieve contacts in the group and select "Batch Update via Profile" from the -actions- drop-down menu. You then get a table with a row for each contact in the group and the fields you've selected for updated. Update some or all of them and click "Update" - and your changes are saved.

We've had 1.5 deployed and running for our partner Questbridge and their scholarship application program. This week is the final week for submitting applications, and as expected the servers and systems are under a fair amount of load. Lucky for us, we did go through a similar experience with the college prep application in april and have some idea of what to expect etc, but we are still learning a fair amount from this.