We've recently begun work to extend the Avalanche Forecast module and push it in a new direction for Drupal 7.

Keying off of the work we did previously with EGA, we saw an opportunity to improve on grants management in CiviCRM by using VBO to flag grants.

If you're running a Drupal/CiviCRM site where members have Drupal user accounts, you may find yourself in a situation where you want to expose CiviCRM data on a Drupal user page. We like to use this technique when we've pushed all of the member information into the CiviCRM contact, so the only thing specific about the member on the Drupal side is their username and role.

Webform is a fantastic Drupal module that allows an end-user to easily build custom forms; things like polls, surveys and registration forms. There are numerous related projects including one recent addition that provides integration with CiviCRM.

Chuck Phillips from Digitaria presented at the April DUG meeting. It was interesting to learn about their campaign work but even more interesting was his presentation on a well managed development and production environment using webistrano.

We're excited to see even more adoption of the discount module we've been developing. The CiviCRM core team has proposed a Make-it-Happen to bring event and membership discounts to CiviCRM 4.1. If the goal is reached, discounts will be an integral part of CiviCRM and not just a Drupal module.

One of our clients reported a problem of stalled contribution pages after clicking submit. The page would simply timeout and give back a not-so-friendly HTTP 500 error. After a bit of debugging and banging heads against the wall, we asked dlobo for a bit of help on IRC. 20 minutes later, he traced the bug back to CRM/Member/BAO/Membership.php and generated a patch against 3.4.

The CiviCRM discount module we've been working on over the last couple of months has reached a new milestone. We've added the ability for discount codes to be purchased via Ubercart.

Profiles can be used to collect and expose data from CiviCRM. One common scenario is to display a membership directory. Recently, one of our clients wanted to use several different profiles to present different aspects of their membership directory based on groups, tags and a few custom fields.

We've been working with one of our clients to rebuild the way they capture membership information, both new and renewing. One of the requirements is to allow potential members to signup for access to forums, comments, subscriptions, etc. The goal is to provide the user with a smooth, logical process to create an account and if they choose, to become a member.

As we implement a few remaining tweaks and features in anticipation of a "1.0" stable release to the CiviEvent Discount module, we reflect on the last ~6 weeks.

In the process of improving Drupal/CiviCRM performance for a client, we discovered that CiviMember Roles Sync was killing the database every 15 minutes. Digging into the LAMP stack and analyzing the workflow for the organization, we learned they set the sync to Drupal cron out of necessity.

We're working on a module to generate discount codes for events in CiviCRM. It's still in early development but it should be useful enough to play around with. We recommend waiting for a stable release before deploying it into a production environment for real events. A recent feature we added was the ability to set monetary or percentage based discounts.

We were recently contracted to improve performance on a large Drupal install. This is a Pressflow site that's been touched by many different hands over the years, a heavily modified theme (~30 custom templates), and over 200 modules. While the site felt snappy, there were some pages that took a long time to load (5-9 seconds).

With the help of a new co-maintainer (thanks AJA), we've consolidated all the patches for uc_civicrm and moved them to Drupal. This allows us to better maintain version releases, issues, documentation, etc.

UTOSC 2010 is October 7-9. If you haven't registered yet, there is still time but you just missed the early bird registration. If you're looking for a discount you can volunteer (get in for free, get some free swag) by e-mailing enlist@utos.org.

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?