Blog posts by jamie

Many many years ago (quite possibly 2016), at about the same time, AGH Strategies and the Progressive Technology Project (PTP) each developed an extension called "Petition Email." Both extensions provided the exact same missing feature for CiviCRM's Petition component: When a signer fills out a CiviCRM petition, an email is automatically sent to a pre-defined target.

In case you have been living under a rock, the CiviCRM development environment has dramatically changed over the last 5 years. Recently I've had the opportunity to upgrade my 10 year old CiviCRM development chops by learning some of the new tools and I thought I would share my experiences.

At the Progressive Technology Project, we have been struggling with getting our mass emails out more quickly for quite some time. However, since we went from 5.13 ESR to 5.21 things seemed to have gotten worse. And there is no change with the latest 5.27 ESR. After countless hours trying to sift through all the factors (of course there are way more factors then just the CiviCRM core version!), I'm turning to the community for ideas.

Long, long ago, before we had indoor plumbing, penicillin or `civix generate:module`, a humble drupal module was born.

It tried its best to be helpful by employing an (at the time) cutting edge technique known as CRM_Utils_Migrate_Import to dump a motley collection of custom fields, profiles and options into your CiviCRM database.

Powerbase (the Progressive Technology Project's hosted CiviCRM program) provides a Drupal site for your CiviCRM database, but, even though it's in Drupal, you can't use it for your web site. Your web site must be hosted elsewhere.

Anyone who has tried to login to their CiviCRM database via their phone knows the feeling: utter helplessness. You would even be forgiven for thinking CiviCRM is actively hostile to the small screen.

We recently had one of our groups report that merging data was resulting in data loss. Specifically, when they merged two records, they noticed that the contribution records on the record that was deleted were not carried over to the record that remained.

I investigated and found the culprit: we were missing a foreign key constraint between the contribution table and the contact table. In fact, we were missing a lot of foreign key constraints in this database.

The ability to create petitions in CiviCRM was a tremendous move forward for people using CiviCRM for political organizing. The petitions feature took another step forward with the Petition Email extension, that allows copies of your petition to be automatically sent by email to a given target.

When generating mailing labels, CiviCRM users have the option of choosing the address to be used (e.g. you can select "Primary," "Home" or "Work") depending on where you want to reach your contacts.

CiviMail, however, does not provide this option. Instead, CiviMail automatically chooses the address for each contact - a process we can only control on a contact-by-contact basis by setting the "Bulk Mail" or "Primary" flags for each individual contact.

Have you ever completed a training a wondered whether usage of your CiviCRM database changed as a result? Have you ever wondered who were the major database users in your organization and who might need more prodding?

The Progressive Technology Project is please to announce that now, with the Database Health Report, you can find out.