Blog posts by Dave Greenberg

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Novembre 17, 2006
By Dave Greenberg Filed under CiviCRM

We are happy to announce that our 1.6 Alpha release is now available for preview and testing on our servers. We'd like to get as many folks trying out the new features as possible over the next week. This will help us move quickly to a downloadable Beta release - which is currently scheduled for November 29.

You can login to the sandbox at:

http://sandbox.trunk.civicrm.org

User - demo Password - demo

Highlights of the release - and things we especially like folks to try out are: * Ajax-based suggestive search in the Contact Search box (left column) * Dynamically loaded sections in Advanced Search and Contact View Screens

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Novembre 15, 2006
By Dave Greenberg Filed under CiviCRM

There's been a lively discussion on the mailing list about requirements for linking CMS (Drupal / Joomla) Users to CiviCRM contacts and handling contributions from both types of contacts. We recognize that there is still work needed to handle the variety of use cases out there - but we've made decent progress in the upcoming 1.6 release:

CMS (Drupal / Joomla) users can be "linked" to either an Individual contact (default behavior) OR and Organization contact. Sites will be able to provide a separate user registration link which will expose Organization profile(s) and create a user record, a new contact Organization record - and "link" them.
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Novembre 15, 2006
By Dave GreenbergFiled under

Closing in on the 1.6 release...

We made our goal for last week - reducing the existing queue items to 4! Most of the team has switched to unit testing mode. Each team member is taking on a group of Resolved issues from the master 1.6 queue and retesting the functionality. This has surfaced 2 new problems - bringing the total open count to 6 as of this morning.

In general, we are trying to make sure that a person other than the original assignee does the unit tests - so there is another set of eyes. After testing, team members are "signing off" on the issue by marking it Closed.

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Novembre 14, 2006
By Dave Greenberg Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM
This installment of our architecture series will introduce the templating system used by CiviCRM as the presentation layer (e.g. to actually render forms and pages). Every CiviCRM screen is "composed" from one or more template files. These files contain a combination of HTML tags, text, variables and (often) some code to control presentation logic. CiviCRM uses an open-source templating engine called Smarty. If you are planning on examining, debugging and/or and modifying CiviCRM screens - you'll want to spend some time reviewing Smarty's online documentation.
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Novembre 14, 2006
By Dave GreenbergFiled under

A common question on the mailing list has been about CiviCRM search, scalability and speed. Currently basic/advanced search has been designed to try to get as many matches as possible from your contact data. However trying to get as many matches as possible results in some major inefficiencies which does not work for data sets of reasonable size

Currently the default search does the following:

1. For any value typed in the name field, it searches the civicrm_contact table and the civicrm_email table. It connects the two tables using two LEFT JOIN's via the civicrm_location table. LEFT JOIN's are not very efficient sql operators

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Novembre 14, 2006
By Dave Greenberg Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM

CiviCRM Forms and Wizards (multi-page forms) are based on PEAR's HTML_QuickForm_Controller. (QFC). QFC in turn is based on HTML_QuickForm (QF). It was easier for us to model a single form as a one page wizard, and hence all CiviCRM forms are instances of QFC

The basic Form object is CRM_Core_Form. All forms are derived from this class. Each derived class is expected to implement the following functions

function preProcess( ): This function is called before a form is built. All objects needed to build the form should be built in this function. function buildQuickForm( ): This function builds the form. There are some helper functions in CRM_Core_Form to build some elements (Radio, Select, Yes/No etc). Classes typically call a mixture of these helper functions and QF functions directly
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Novembre 11, 2006
By Dave Greenberg Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM

We now move onto the more interesting stuff of what really happens when a request is made and the objects that are responsible for building the response. The top level CiviCRM objects are:

Form (CRM_Core_Form): CiviCRM forms are based on HTML_QuickForm. For drupal folks, this is more of an object representation of the much loved form api Wizard (CRM_Core_Controller): A set of CiviCRM Forms that collectively make up an action (Import Wizard, Mailing Wizard etc). For simplicty sake a one page Form is represented as a Wizard (CRM_Core_Controller_Simple)
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Novembre 11, 2006
By Dave Greenberg Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM

CiviCRM uses the PEAR package DB_DataObject to access the mysql database. Doing so reduces the amount of sql we need to write to fetch / store values for a single table. For queries involving more than one table, we write them manually since since it was fairly painful to try to force complicated queries using DB_DataObject (we did use DB_DO for multiple table queries when we wrote EmailNow, in the end we felt the hoops we had to jump through was not worth the effort and hence the current scheme)

The basic PHP classes that represent a table are called DAO's (Data Access Objects). These are generated automatically by (xml/GenCode.php) which also generates the sql structure for that specific table. The xml files representing the schema is stored under CIVCRM_ROOT/xml/schema. The sql file generated (civicrm_41.mysql and civicrm_40.mysql) are stored under CIVICRM_ROOT/sql (note that the generated files are not present in the svn repository). The DAO files are stored under CIVICRM_ROOT/CRM/Core/DAO (and under appropriate directories based on what table it is, this is configured in the xml representation.

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Novembre 6, 2006
By Dave GreenbergFiled under

here is a tentative schedule for CiviCRM v1.6. The feature list for v1.6 is here. As all good open source software projects, the below schedule is subject to change :)

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Novembre 6, 2006
By Dave Greenberg Filed under Architecture, CiviCRM

Make sure you read the Introduction Chapter of this series for a better understanding of the below. Developers might be interested in installing CiviCRM from our svn repository

Some of the important directories under CiviCRM svn root are:

CRM: Most of the CiviCRM specific source code is stored in the directory. This directory is further sub-divided into other directories based on functionality (Core, Utils, Contact, Contribute, Mailing etc). xml: CiviCRM schema and the base Data access objects (DAO) are automatically generated from a simplified xml scheme which contains a fair amount of sql and type information. This makes it relatively easy for us to change the sql code, figure out what changes were made in a version and add meta information to a table within PHP.
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