Blog posts by Eileen

All sites are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the latest secure versions of CiviCRM: v4.7.14 and v4.6.24.

For many years CiviCRM has had the capability to log all actions that take place in the database but while it mostly works well there have been a few issues. I looked into these recently and came up with some improvements, which shipped in 4.7.7 - but if you want to take advantage of them there are some actions you might need to take. This article is mostly intended for a technical audience.

How does CiviCRM logging work?

At the beginning of this year I announced the intention of the LTS team to support 4.6 as the next LTS and we are committed to keeping 4.6 secure until one year after we stopped supporting 4.4 - ie. the end of January 2017. As with 4.4 the level of support will tail off as key contributors move off 4.6. At this stage we are still getting a large number of fixes for 4.6 and expect to see monthly point releases continuing for the rest of the year.

We have replaced the 4.6.17 release with a 4.6.18 release. This addresses some 4.6.17 regressions that notably affect CiviVolunteer and the estimating groups count on the mailing screen. There was also a pdf creation related error. The issues are to do with 4.6.17 security backports from 4.7 that missed something out.

If you have not yet gotten the security fixes in 4.6.17 you should choose 4.6.18.

Inspired by a colleague I suggested we report today's sprint events in Haiku. Here are the burnt offerings from Colarado!

Many Civi Bugs

Ate the sprinters pesticide

And died horribly

Busy sites have often encountered problems with deadlocks on the group contact cache. There were no less that 3 different code contributions to mitigate this problem put up for 4.7.8 and a number of other discussions have been going on in JIRA.

This is the 3rd in my 'Performance for Guppies'  blog series. The metaphor is wearing a pretty thin now - but anyone who remembers the history of the api team will know I'm not above flogging a dead metaphor or a bad joke for several years past it's sell by date.

Using extensions on 4.7 I discovered that if you add entities but don't define them via hook you can get errors.

So, if you have an extension that defines entities you need a hook like the one below

Someone really did give me a kitten for Christmas once. He was cute and funny and unwillingly cuddly. I got a lot of enjoyment out of him, not to mention years of semi-safe passwords. He also chased away our existing cat and eventually we couldn't look after him as our living circumstances changed.