Projects

Association for Contextual Behavioral Science

Association for Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS) reached out to Dharmatech because their system was on life-support and they wanted an upgrade.

ACBS came to us running Drupal 5.1, CiviCRM 2.0.7, custom Drupal modules, custom PHP snippets running in node, views and blocks. They had nagging issues that dated back 2+ years, event registration was flakey and a 'foreign key constraint' error message for members when they try to update their membership. When we take on upgrade projects like this, one thing always stands out: what's the impact? We want to know that the effort we put into a problem will somehow push the organization forward. ACBS was also an early adopter: originally running Drupal 4.7 and CiviCRM 1.9. It's very important to us to support early adopters.

After speaking with Emily, the Executive Director, at length about the scope of the project, it was clear she had realistic expectations. She was able to clearly articulate the problems she's experienced in the past, the current problems she was having with Drupal/CiviCRM, as well as ideas for the future. How she could use CiviCRM to better manage events, self-service memberships, increase membership internationally, etc. It was clear we had her support.

At the start of the project, we classified problem areas on her site. Split into 'supported in Drupal 6', 'not-supported but might work', 'not-supported, won't work', and 'unknown.' The upgrade status module was invaluable for this initial assessment.

From there, we pulled a snapshot of her site into a sandbox on our colo VPS (Proxmox). Proxmox makes it easy to build/teardown containers with any number of configuration parameters (RAM, HD, CPU).

We then disabled all modules and upgraded core to Drupal 5.22 and made sure all contributed modules were also upgraded including CiviCRM. This was a good stopping point, allowing Emily to walkthrough the site and verify there were no regression issues.

Upgrading to Drupal 6 proved to be trickier. In all, we hit more than 50 issues ranging from:

• Child pages not appearing in book content type
• Inconsistent naming for paths
• Broken views
• Rewriting custom D5 code to D6
• Converting from Event module to Date/Calendar
• Formatting issues because of missing input filter
• Membership not moving from new to current
• Expired members not able to update their membership

We filed a number of bugs and patches for some of the issues we encountered. Others we chalked up to a messy installation. Others we chalked up to the orientation of the moon... sometimes weird things happen and we don't have time or energy to figure them all out. What's important is we fix it for the client and try to identify it so it helps us in the future and others.

ACBS is very happy with their upgrade. New features, bug fixes, and a clean system. This was a very rewarding upgrade for us and we feel good knowing that the problems of her incremental ad-hoc upgrades in the the past will not perpetuate.