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New dedupe for CiviCRM 2.1 – check it out on sandbox

By shotFiled under

The new dedupe engine and UI landed on trunk (development part of our code repository) last week, and we’d be more than happy if you gave it a try on our CiviCRM 2.1 sandbox and let us know how it works for you.

The new dedupe, besides the engine changes described earlier, sports a new user interface. Navigate to Administer CiviCRM → Find and Merge Duplicate Contacts and check out the new admin screens.

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Amazon EC2: a foundation for a CiviCRM based ASP?

By lobo Filed under Architecture

Earlier this month Evan posted a query about a CiviCRM AMI for Amazon EC2. Joe Murray responded with some proof of concept scripts along with the persistent storage space limitations in EC2. Seems like the folks at EC2 have been busy addressing these limitations and have introduced persistent storage support for EC2 (its currently in beta).

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New CiviCRM Articles at NTEN.org

By Dave Greenberg Filed under Teams

Two new CiviCRM-related articles just got posted on the NTEN.org website - and might be of interest to folks...

Michelle Murrain writes about Open Source CRMs - How Do They Stack Up.

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CiviCRM team meeting now on IRC ...

By lobo Filed under Teams

Most of you are probably aware that CiviCRM is developed and maintained by a team of dedicated developers spread around the world (India, Poland, USA and New Zealand). We have had regular team meeting over IM / Skype the past couple of years on a weekly basis. We figured it might make sense to try holding the meeting in a public forum so more community folks can participate in the development and running of CiviCRM.

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CiviCRM UK Usergroup: first meeting in London

By michaelmcandrewFiled under
If you're in the area, then come along to the first UK CiviCRM usergroup tomorrow at 4pm GMT. It's at Voluntary Action Westminster, 37 Chapel St, London, Greater London, NW1 5DP. Anyone using / developing / interested in CiviCRM as an ICT professional / non profit employee / volunteer, etc. is welcome to drop by, share success stories, talk through problems, work out how to collaborate better, and be part of future developments. We'll have Dave Greenberg joining us on Skype as the day starts in San Francisco (around 5 or 6pm our time). I'll report back here on how things went. After London, we plan on touring round the country a bit. Bristol and Manchester to start off. More information in this forum post. Hope you can join us tomorrow. Michael
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CiviCRM at Connecting Up 2008 Conference - Brisbane

By andrewFiled under

Earlier today I had the pleasure of presenting and demonstrating CiviCRM to about 40 people working in the non-profit sector at Connecting Up 2008 (see http://www.connectingup.org)

This year's conference had a strong focus on the use of social media, and today's keynote speaker was Beth Kanter, who is well known as a trainer, blogger and consultant on how non-profits can make best use of social media (http://beth.typepad.com).

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Case Management Feasibility and Design Work

By Dave Greenberg Filed under CiviCase
Case management is a central activity for a large number of non-profits and NGO's who are current or prospective users of CiviCRM. Basic support for defining cases as a grouping of activities with a "client" was added to CiviCRM 2.0 through the sponsorship of Frontline Defenders. Subsequently, interest has been growing for adding more comprehensive case management support to CiviCRM. Earlier this year Michelle Murrain of NOSI organized a lively discussion list which allowed folks to share ideas about requirements and use cases. Andrew Clarke, the Executive Director of The Physician Health Program of British Columbia (PHP-BC) was one of the participants in that discussion. PHP-BC provides "advocacy and support for physicians...who are experiencing problems related to personal and family emotional health issues..." They have been looking to replace their current data management system. Recognizing the potential of an open source solution that could both serve his organization's needs AND those of other human service organizations - Andrew advocated and obtained funding to partner with CiviCRM in designing and developing a CiviCase component.
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Performance improvements in 2.1

By lobo Filed under Architecture
So i've been looking a bit closely at performance for 2.1 (both database and usability) and am attempting to boost it up significantly compared to 2.0 (and prior). Here are some of the highlights We've introduced a new database cache table (civicrm_cache) to cache a few database queries that are repeated a lot. Some of the specific queries include listing all the fields available for the contact types (individual/org/household). This is a combination of the built-in fields (name, address etc) and the custom fields added by the user. This reduces the number of queries invoked from 5 complex queries to 1 simple cache query (and an un-serialize) We've added a column (group_type) to the profile table (civicrm_uf_group), so we know the profile type rather than recompute it every time we need it. Thanx to Dave Lange who reported and did some analysis on this, we've reduced the number of LOWER( dbColumnName) LIKE 'value' to skip the LOWER part. Email is now stored as lower case, so we can skip the LOWER part in all email comparison. In his tests, these have improved performance a fair bit Smart Groups Hierarchical Select Menu System DeDupe We will integrate the ACL changes into core either as a pluggable ACL architecture and/or via the hook system. Overall 2.1 is shaping up to be a significant improvement over 2.0 :). You can get more details on the 2.1 feature set and release schedule on the CiviCRM v2.1 wiki page.
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Caching Smart Groups (and optimizing Search / ACL's / Nested groups)

By lobo Filed under Architecture
One of the core features of CiviCRM is the ability to store a query as a group (smart group). This allows folks to create groups of contacts that share the same attribute(s). For e.g. A group of all the people in California. Thus contacts can be added/edited/deleted from the database, and the smart group will always give you all the contacts who live in CA at that point in time. I suspect this feature is heavily used by quite a few installs.
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CiviCRM Developer Hackathon - Tired but Smiling

By Dave Greenberg Filed under Teams
I'm on my way back to San Francisco after an incredibly stimulating three weeks of collaborating (and co-habitating) with fellow "Civi's". There were lots of very long days (12 - 15 hours) of brainstorming , designing, hammering out code... intermingled with cooking and eating some lovely meals together, a few cool adventures in the natural beauty of New Zealand, and some excellent meetups with members of the community "down-under". This was our fourth "international" team gathering. In planning for it we tried to build on the things that worked best in our prior meetups - and learn from things that didn't work as well. We decided to focus tightly on a few key goals / projects - and worked hard at staying on task. (This meant resisting the gravitational pulls of email, forums, team members not with us etc.) We set a schedule for moving through our projects and decided up front that it was ok to move on to the next task without completing 100% of the current one.
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