Blog posts by xavier

Thanks to the good folks at the Party of European Socialists that sponsored the feature, Tech To the People & CiviCrm have made easier to generate name badges and place cards for your events.

Relationship are a natural way of storing relations between contacts. However, it doesn't work so well if you have several hundreds of related contacts as the realationship tab becomes unreadable quite quickly. One of our client needed to associate each individual in their base to a local branch (we implemented a nice geo lookup based on the postal code to identify the local branch, but that's another story). It means that each local branch has 1000th of individuals. This could happen in other situations, for instance to keep a relationship between a "main teacher" and each pupil or who is the latest volunteer that contacted each person in a GOTV/ Canvassing campaign...

Hi all, Working on CiviEvent to add two nice features that are going to be included on 3.2: 1) Now you can send a link with the checksum token to the registration page, so the form is pre-filled even for contacts that don't have a login/password 2) And you can register someone else, even when you are logged in, eg. the admin users can register new people from the online registration like if they where anonymous. One more thing or two I think could be tweaked to make civievent even easier to use: 1) Admin Interface Right now, you have two "modes":

It is midnight, we are busy finishing proof-reading the last chapters, after having been spoiled one more time with a scrumptious dinner cooked by an amazing Jill. After 4 days, time to put some numbers on this sprint: 5 squirrels, 8 chipmunks, dozen of blue jays 2 coyotes, and 1 bernese mountain dog, and 11 000 words, spread around a lot of new chapters both aiming the users of CiviCRM and the developers.

Hi all,

Following the success of the UK developer camp and meetup this summer, Michael, the Polish team of CiviCRM (Michał and Piotr) and myself have been discussing about organising one in Brussels.

We have chosen to organise it just before or after FOSDEM, that will happen this year on the 6th and 7th of February 2010.

This event is an opportunity where CiviCRM developers, administrator and users from the UK and Europe can get together around CiviCRM – and we’d like you to tell us what you want to see at the camp.

You might want to display more information that those that are assigned by default in the template. My goal was to have a simple way of retrieving more information from civicrm than the ones available in the template, without having to modify the php code . For instance, I used it to display all the employees of an organisation from the profile that displays the organisation, or to display a list ofother contacts that live in the same country than the contact you're viewing. In London in the last training, we discussed about displaying the activities directly in the contact summary tab for instance.

A quick braindump:

Profile are a great way of simplifying the interface and provide more focussed forms, but some of the goodies of the normal edit form are gone. For instance, the employer isn't anymore an autocomplete field. luckily, with the REST interface and a jquery autocomplete plugin, that's a few lines to add to make it work:

add on the templates/CRM/Profile/Form/Edit.tpl

{if $session->get('userID') > 0} {literal} jQuery(document).ready(function($) {

On every installation, you need to categorise your contacts, by what they are (journalists, volunteers, members of your organisations, big donors, politicians...), by what they are interested in (a specific topic, a specific region, age group, type of activity you offer...), by how you interact with them (do they receive your mailing list ? are they invited to your next event....)

Hi,

As you know, CiviCRM collects informations about the installations, like numbers of contacts, what modules are used.

I'm wondering if you would find useful to have more statistics in a new reporting screen on your installation (beside the numbers of records, knowing how many are tagged, have a postal address, have a phone, have relationships...).

Hello everyone, Tags are a powerful way of organising contacts, and you can use them to add topics of interest, type of organisations, type of donors... as you might already have discovered, you can quickly get a lot of them, and it becomes quite difficult to use them properly as soon as you have more than an handful.