Thursday 23th and Friday 24th of March we are having a mini-sprint in the Ede (NL) in which we will fix CiviCRM bugs. We are with four of us already (Erik Hommel, Alain Benbassat, Klaas Eikelboom and me) so it is going to be fun! That is the main reason and the other reason is that we want to contribute to CiviCRM Core.
Our plan is to have two days for fixing CiviCRM bugs once in the month or once in the two months. But at least regularly and fitting to our busy schedule.
Some of you will know, use and might even love the CiviRules extension. We certainly do! Quite a few of the organizations we support with their CiviCRM stuff use and love it, and judging by the question on StackExchange and issues and pull requests on GitHub quite a few more do too!
In this blog I want to explain the round up we have done around the refactoring of the acl_contact_cache. In the previous sprints we discovered that a lot of the performance was slowed down by the way the acl_contact_cache was used (or rather not used at all).
Just a heads up for the community that "Using CiviCRM" by Joe Murray and Brian Shaughnessy is Packt Publishing's free book of the day. See https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning.
This book is a good overview of the system despite being written for a much older version of CiviCRM. In particular the early chapter on planning your CRM implementation is still applicable and valuable information that is often overlooked.
If you contribute to CiviCRM, we want to know about it. Now, you might ask "don't you already know given that contributions improve the code, coordinate events, extend the system, etc.?" Well, yes, that is true, but coordinating all of that information in such a way that we, as a small Core Team, can recognize it effectively is no small task.
Over the past year I have been volunteering time to help out in the effort to raise funds for the Hundertwasser Art Centre. In order to help the HAC project I have added a couple of reports that may be useful for other pledge users (or possibly sites that track money received through campaigns).
Considering CiviCRM for your organization? New to CiviCRM and in need of some tips? Experienced with CiviCRM and ready for advanced instruction? Then join us for CiviCamp Denver 2017! There is something for everyone and it's a great opportunity to plug in and network with this outstanding open-source community.
Got a load of spreadsheet data from a 3rd party to import as activities/contributions but it's not matched up with contacts? Want an efficient way to reduce duplicates caused by messy spreadsheets? This extension might just help.
When email was first designed, security was not considered important and up until fairly recently it was still possible to send an email from any address and get away with it.
The last two days we spent another sprint at socialist party to improve performance. And again we used a guy with database knowledge to analyze our queries. We have optimized a few things so far one of the major areas to improve next was the ACL part of queries. That is the part of the query to decide which contacts you are allowed to see. So at the socialist party they have local chapter administrator who are only allowed to see the active members in their local area.
