Blogs

Over the weekend we attended hackUTOS, a code sprint free for all. Organized by the Utah Open Source Foundation it brings together open source advocates, hackers, code monkeys, terminal jockeys, and a healthy dose of peanuts. This is the opportunity to share and exchange knowledge with others and spend some quality time working on pet projects.

My name is John Foye and I'm a sophomore at University of Pennsylvania studying Finance and Materials Science Engineering. As of right now, I’m fairly clueless as to what I want to do with my life, though I am interested in start-ups, especially involving the solar industry. Other than that, I love spending time outdoors backpacking and climbing, and I run track for Penn.

We never had a reason to know how easy it is to add a login block until recently. Sure, we enable the default User login block and tell it to appear wherever, but what if you want the title to appear differently depending on the path?

The uc_civicrm module that integrates Ubercart with CiviCRM has been updated to support CiviCRM 3.0.2 and Ubercart 6.x-2.2.  You can download it here.

Introduction: The Need

Progressive Technology Project (PTP) supports grassroots community organizing groups nationwide that engage in social, economic and environmental justice efforts to empower low-income people and communities of color. These groups conduct phone banking and field canvassing as an integral part of their base-building and voter engagement strategies to engage existing and new constituents. PTP hired Dharmatech to help them build PowerBase: a customized CiviCRM for use by community organizing groups.

FileMaker is a popular "personal database" package that runs on the Windows or Mac desktop.  Many organizations keep their data in a FileMaker database.  Because of the limitations of this method of maintaining a database, some organizations wish to migrate their database to CiviCRM.  This article describes the obstacles in doing that and how to overcome them.

Wild Utah Project (WUP), along with other conservationists and scientists, has been developing the Rapid-Stream Riparian Assessment, which uses scientific indicators to determine stream health.  WUP approached us to "build an RSRA database" and make it accessible for the world to use.  We were able to leverage their existing Drupal CMS and extend it to make their vision a reality.  We built the custom web-based database in less than 50 hours, at a fraction of the market cost.  It was completed ahead of schedule and far exceeded their initial requirements.

We recently had a client that needed to allow anonymous users to update CiviCRM data. No problem right? Right! As long as those anonymous users aren't updating optional fields.

Attachments: 

civicrm_profile_tweak-6.x-1.x-dev.tar_.gz

A client of ours recently had a perfectly reasonable request. They wanted their users to be redirected to a CiviCRM profile upon logging in so their users can update their contact information. But they only wanted this redirect to happen the very first time they login; not every time which would get annoying.

Attachments: 

rules.txt

We take an agile approach to projects, looking at number of sprints and number of hours per sprint. That allows us to produce something tangible at the end of the sprint (say 1 week). Not that it gives us any greater ability to predict time/cost but we feel sprints/hours per sprint makes it easier for us in project planning.