Blogs

On a system with roughly 25,000 activities, running on a dedicated server, the case dashboard would take over a minute to load. Other orgs have reported similar problems, and in at least two cases the consultants simply removed the upcoming/recent sections from the dashboard since it was just too slow.

Taking for example the upcoming section, on the server above the query would take about 26 seconds. With some optimization, it now takes less than 1 second.

Code sprint is always fun. It's gives you great opportunity to meet fellow civi folks, collaborate and implement kool stuff :). Last few days has been very interesting. Besides some great meals we also managed to get some work done. ( If you still don't know, food is the most important part of CiviCRM Sprints )

We had a good discussion that came up because we were discussing a change being made to lower the barriers that currently exist for evaluators of CiviCase. We thought it would be good to write down some things:

Goals for this sprint are quite ambitious - three books instead of updating only one, so second day was quite intensive. Alice with Robyn from Progressive Technology Project are making incredible progress on describing CiviCampaign, Michael from Third Sector Design (who's also book maintainer) and Dave from Circle Interactive are putting together freshly spinned off developer handbook, and Abril from Alternativas y Capacidades and myself writing about applications of CiviCRM in human rights work. Not too much more to say about today - everyone is typing their keyboards furiously, since there is still a lot of work ahead of us. Helen from Flossmanuals joined us today - she will be working with us as editor for the rest of the spring, looking out for inconsistencies in the book and helping us make more polished.

Maybe a few words about what we do with Abril - out goal is to prepare small booklet for organisations working in human rights field, with descriptive information about how CiviCRM can be used to make their work easier and more effective. We are writing about using CiviCRM as human rights violation documentation system, but also decided to describe a few most common activities, like fundraising, mobilising supporters, managing volunteers and also do a bit more research about existing examples. We're still at early stage - writing a log of notes, researching and exchanging ideas, but it seems like it will be quite interesting and useful material. Hold your fingers!

As it is well-known, you can never have too many Dave's, so we've gathered three of the four Dave's here (Dave G, Dave J, and Dave D) along with some nice and smart people not named Dave (Tim O, Yashoda), and are working towards incorporating some community feedback into CiviCase. A list of improvements we're currently working on here at the sprint includes:

In May, Giant Rabbit relaunched CompassPoint Nonprofit Services’ website and CRM, transitioning them away from a proprietary CMS and CRM to a Drupal/CiviCRM solution.  We came across a lot of unique requirements and challenges throughout the transition process.  This post will focus on one feature that required significant customizations to CiviCRM:  A multiple event registration shopping cart.

Just one day after arrving back from weeks of holidays I found myself in the train from Brummen (The Netherlands) to London for CiviCon 2011, of which we were proud Silver sponsors. We arrived in time, and it was great to meet my API friends Xavier Dutoit and Eileen McNaughton (who I had never met IRL) and Kurund Jalmi and Yashodha Chaku from the CiviCRM Core team.