CiviCRM workshop in London

The London CiviCRM event was short, 2 days, but packed with information. Bringing together both developers and advanced users it fused nicely the two sides of the fence.

We needed to install a version of 2.2 CiviCRM  on our sandboxes in order to attend; well it was a breeze to do, perhaps down to the installer which handled the install – no need to even touch config files. So that was a great start.

The workshops themselves were tailored around our specific interests/ skillsets. There was also a lot to be learnt from the other developers. A talk about what was to come in 2.3 was exciting – usability issues have really been taken on board, and configuring events is now made much easier with the new tab approach whereby you don't need to go through the whole wizard to get to the part of interest.

Discussions about the CivicCRM Hook API made it clear just how easy it is to use the CiviCRM hooks and achieve powerful results, such as hiding and showing tabs etc. This areas is also really well documented on the CiviCRM Wiki page. It was pretty easy to put together some hooks in a Drupal module and make instant chages within the CiviCRM UI. Kurund Jalmi took us through exactly how to create the module. We also walked through integration with views which worked perfectly to create lists of CiviCRM participants in an event, for example.

One of the most fascinating talks for me was by Xavier Dutoit, who dealt with the use of AJAX over REST to make forms much more usable – populating them with just the relevant data for a particular constituency for example. It was clear that Xavier already had a very good knowledge of jQuery to achive such results, but it was inspiring to see just how powerful this combination could be and without need to get ones hands into code beyond the template level. I hope that he blogs, and documents some more of the techniques used.

Lobo went deeper into some of the architecture of CiviCRM. Pointing out how sessions are used to carry data through form sequences, and comparing CiviCRM to a big form processing application. The depth of thought that has gone into CiviCRM, its use of OO php and Soap at the core level was pretty fascinating, showing how it really is in some way an equivalent to the present day approach of modern frameworks handling the business logic via objects rather than SQL code. The care taken over the hooks API on the other hand shows the care that they have taken to look after us developers.

I feel that I have gained a much better understanding of CiviCRM than I had in the past and that working in the future I will have a much better idea where to start, making changes that will not interfere with the upgrade path. Thank you to all the folks at CiviCRM for the workshop and to Civic Actions for giving me the opportunity to attend.