Blog posts by Névtelen

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By Névtelen Filed under Architecture, CiviMember

Being able to efficiently identify and merge duplicate contacts and related data is be an important -- and often time-consuming -- task for organizations getting data from multiple sources. The current CiviCRM dedupe and merge process does not scale well beyond a moderate number of contacts and consequently there has been dicussion on the forums and IRC about optimizing the dedupe and merge code in CiviCRM.

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By Névtelen Filed under Meetups

Were you thinking of attending the Mumbai CiviCRM Meet up  - July 2010  last Thursday in India  or wondering what exactly is shared, discussed, explained, who attended ?…

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By Névtelen Filed under CiviMail

Sendgrid is a relatively new cloud-based service that takes care of mailing list SMTP delivery and attempts to get the highest possible deliverability rate. We didn't want to have to manage our own SMTP server here at the Participatory Politics Foundation, so when we migrated to CiviCRM recently, we decided to take the sendgrid route for SMTP.

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By Névtelen Filed under CiviEvent, Drupal 7

UPDATE: Dec 17, 2010

dharmatech has contributed a similar module to drupal.

d.o. page: http://drupal.org/project/civievent_discount

civi blog: http://civicrm.org/blogs/dharmatech/add-coupons-events-module

great job dharmatech!

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By NévtelenFiled under
This year at the first CiviCon we had a great session lead by CiviAction's Ian Rhett about taking CiviCRM into the mobile space. It was a very engaging brainstorm session with a lot of great ideas thrown out there. My time this week at WWDC provided a little inspiration and time spent in a hotel room to create some mockups of what this could look like. I have posted some images below. I think one of the big conclusions at CiviCon is that the app could be built to do a lot of things but at this point working to achieve a CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) app is probably the best starting place. This is a project that I would like to start to work on along with my team at emotive. I think the best approach is to develop the app using the Appcelerator Titanium platform. It's an open source development platform that translates javascript into native iPhone/iPad, Android and coming soon Blackberry apps. I figure that most of us know Javascript much more than we do C or C++ and this would provide us with a single codebase for multiple mobile platforms.
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By NévtelenFiled under

A couple month ago I raised the question about CiviCRM importing scalability, and received mixed answers.

CiviCRM should be mostly used for data import, not for data cleaning. Most importing scalability issues stem from people's reliance on the system to perform both data clean up and import. CiviCRM has a great data cleaning process that should be taken advantage of when doing a large import.
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By Névtelen Filed under Architecture

I am writing this post to take community feedback on porting CiviCRM to PostgreSQL, the best way to do it, and to team up with any possible members willing to contribute to this effort. Here are my efforts until now. I have not been able to make it 'all' work on PostgreSQL, but certainly to a degree where I can see light at the end of the long tunnel. I am linking 3 PostgreSQL compatible files here:

structure.sql - this has the columns, primary keys, indexes, unique constraints data.sql - this is the sample data included with CiviCRM

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By Névtelen Filed under Schools

The next phase of the CiviSchool project is collecting and maintaining all parent / student information online. This avoids the annual filling out forms work by the parents, and also the stuffing of envelopes by school staff during the summer and reentering all the information in the SIS when school starts.

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By Névtelen Filed under Meetups
We(NET Tuesday Taiwan) have a CiviCRM workshop since last August and had meetups for about 6-7 times. After Jimmy Huang came from CiviCon/Translation Sprint, we had a review meetup at 5/15 and gathered about 40 people from local NGOs. What's the next? Due to limited resource, I think we need have 2~3 successful local case studies and empower ourselves to better support local NGOS. presentation
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By Névtelen Filed under Architecture
I am working on an import guide to help organizations match fields to CiviCRM's standard fieldsets. I noticed that the existing ERDs are pretty outdated. The new database schema is pretty large for one map so I decided to create a map for contacts.
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