Team Blog

Come to Drupalcon Copenhagen

Nobody likes to be in an unproductive meeting. Yet many phone conferences and business meetings drag on way too long, go off-topic or simply have unfocused leadership.

Here are three simple ways you can apply right away to make all your meetings more effective:

• Continue reading

I love learning and sharing tips that make my day more productive. Often times, it's the simplest ones I find the most useful.

If you're like me, you spend a significant portion of your day interacting on the Gmail web interface. However, one of my biggest pet peeves in Gmail is that when composing a new message I lose access to the rest of my mailbox, since it takes up the entire window.

Alas, I discovered the key! By simply by holding down the SHIFT key when clicking COMPOSE MAIL, a pop-up window appears, and access to the full mailbox is retained.

• Continue reading

A question recently came up on our internal team list. One of our team members was looking for recommendations on where to move her money.  She was currently banking with Chase and was disturbed by learning of the connection between Chase and BP.  This being just one reason of many to move your money from a big bank like Chase, she decided it was time.  Many of us at CivicActions bank with local banks or credit unions and the responses to her query brought many stories of others who had either recently or long been banking with credit unions.

• Continue reading

With all the new people joining the CivicActions team in the past few weeks, it's easy for us all to forget an important part of the on-boarding process of new civic-minded nodeists.

Profile pictures.

An appropriate profile picture is essential to one's ensconcement into the CivicActions fold. Before you go digging through iPhoto for that winning head-shot, let me present a brief analysis of what makes a properly awesome CivicActions profile photo.

• Continue reading

No, Code for America isn't looking for a couple thousand gentlemen.  They're looking for geeks (of any gender) to award yearlong Fellowships (living wage, health insurance, travel expenses) starting in 2011 to build Government 2.0 apps for a number of local governments. 

• Continue reading

What're you crazy!? Haven't you ever heard of the CCK module? Yes, it's true CCK coupled with views will allow one to create, manipulate and display custom content. Combined with hook_nodeapi, the cck/views combo is can be extremely powerful and flexible. 99% of the time these two modules are sufficient to handle the job of building and managing custom content. The problem arises when you need any sort of custom access control or ownership of your custom node content. With CCK, the ownership of the node belongs to node.module, and there's no 'access' operator exposed in hook_nodeapi. You could patch core ( http://drupal.org/node/143075 ), but in general, that's not really a road you want to start down.

• Continue reading

If you install Ubuntu 10.04 and you're running Drupal sites, you may want to downgrade the installed PHP 5.3 to 5.2, as though recent Drupal core is mostly 5.3 compatible, some contributed modules aren't yet.

• Continue reading

For some time now, I've wanted to have an svn set up on my shared web host similar to what we have here at civicactions.  Having to make changes on my local machine for any personal (non-civicactions client) sites, then scp those files up to my server is ridiculous -- especially since when working on client sites, I've become so used to simply commiting the changes to a repository and then updating that repository on the server side.  All that said though, I kept putting off the svn set up because as a simple drupal and civicrm developer, I was afraid that a system admin task like setting up svn would be too involved and maybe a bit over my head.  Turns out, I should've done it months ago.  It's crazy easy!

• Continue reading

Idealware just released a report on their survey of nearly 500 nonprofit professionals regarding their use of social media and their perceptions of the efficacy of various social media channels.

• Continue reading