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.

As part of an ongoing project with Environmental Grantmakers Assocation (EGA), which involves moving them off of a series of disparate databases to Drupal/CiviCRM, we developed a solution that allows them to track grants from a 3rd party perspective.

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.

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 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?

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. This post is here for historical reasons. If you're using a fairly recent version of CiviCRM (3.x), you don't need this module.

Attachments: 

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

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.

CiviCRM does a good job at managing fundraising, members, event planning and more.  It contains information on money collected from sources such as online donations, event fees, membership fees, online purchases and fees for service. Many nonprofits use QuickBooks to provide an overall picture of revenue and expenses; however, QuickBooks doesn't offer the freedom to manage relationships the way CiviCRM does.  The need arises for income captured in CiviCRM to flow to Quickbooks. Currently this can only be done with a manual process that is time consuming and error-prone.

PHP programmers sometimes ask whether it is better to code a certain database problem in PHP or SQL.  A recent practical example illustrates that SQL frequently is the best solution for speed of execution.

A common action advocacy organizations ask their constituents to take is to submit a letter to the editor to their local newspaper.  Not only does an organization want their supporters to do it but they also want to be able to track who submitted them and how many were submitted.

Attachments: 

lte.txt