Blog posts by Dave Greenberg

Okay, so 1.8 stable has been released - and the roadmap indicates that it includes CiviReport Phase 1. You may be wondering... How does it work? What does it do? How can I try it out? etc....

Activities and Activity History records are a critical part of the CRM equation. They allow organizations to get a detailed snapshot of the interactions with their constituents. As part of our 2.0 data model overhaul, we are planning major changes to the Activities data model. These changes are designed to: Simplify the data model for activities by merging activity-related tables into a consolidated Activity table. Meeting, Phonecall, Activity History, Email History and SMS History will all be merged and dropped.

One of our primary objects for the 2.0 release is to find ways to simplify the way data is stored and retrieved in order to make querying data from the DB easier and more scalable/efficient. We're questioning a number of different pieces of the current data model - and one big area is storage of address, email and phone data. Part of this process also involves identifying areas where the data model is "out of touch with reality" (i.e. it imposes unrealistic or artificial constraints on the data).

UPDATED: July 24th (slipped beta by a few days and final by a week) Here is a tentative release schedule for v1.8. As in any software project, these dates are tentative and subject to delays. However, based on past history they should be pretty close. Check out the 1.8 Release Roadmap for a summary of features and improvements. We'll be looking for lots of volunteers to start pounding on the Alpha Sandbox next week - announcement to follow shortly.

The entire team has been focused on getting the 1.8 open issues queue down to (almost) zero items by next week - which is our target for code freeze. As of this morning, we're down to 18 open issues - of which several larger items are just about ready for our QA cycle.

I had the privilege of joining a spirited and diverse group of about 100 Joomla! users and developers from places near and far at last weekend's JoomlaDays West "un-conference". The conference was held at Google's "campus" in Mountain View - and was a "sold-out" event with all available spaces taken shortly after the conference was announced.

An excellent question was posted on the forum yesterday about how to modify a CiviCRM Profile screen. This prompted me to finally put together some documentation on the cool "customized templates" feature that was added in 1.7. Customizing CiviCRM Screens

Those of you who've been using CiviCRM for a while and/or following the progress of the project already know that there's never a dull moment around here. It's only a few days after the release of 1.7 stable - and we're well into work on the NEXT release (1.8).

Judy Hallman sent in this write-up from the

Developers who are working on integrating CiviCRM with other modules and/or developing contributions for CiviCRM need to have a good understanding of the database structure. What data is stored in what tables? What type and size of data is valid for a given field? How are the various tables connected to each other? This information can also be helpful when tracking down and potential bug or installation problem. Entity Relationship Diagrams or ERD's provide a graphical representation of database structure. AND...Ben Vautier (SQL Recipes) has graciously contributed (and is maintaining) a pretty comprehensive ERD for CiviCRM and it's componenents (including CiviEvent).