Fen Labalme's blog

As mentioned in the previous post, the recently announced Blackbaud acquisition of Convio - two giants in the closed-source world that provide web services primarily for non-profits - caused a stir not only in the non-profit world but also in the Free and Open Source software world.  Allen Gunn of Aspir

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Earlier this year I was tasked with migrating a 60K contact Kintera database to CiviCRM. To make matters more "interesting", the client also had a home-grown database with mixed information, some defining new contacts and some adding information to the Kintera contacts. As it was a custom database, I won't discuss the second database merge issue any further (perhaps I just want to put it all behind me) except where needed to fill in other points.

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Ten developers came to the Big Apple earlier this week to sit with primary CiviCRM developers @lobo and @dgg during a two-day Usability, Test and Code Sprint. Once again, Rayogram hosted the event, providing a central location in Manhattan and an excellent working environment.

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A community specifically for Drupal developers and users at universities is in the formative stages, see: Forming a Drupal in Higher Edu Consortium; (groups.drupal.org).

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Lots of buzz swirling around about Google+, Google's Facebook-like social networking site.  Much of the buzz surrounds trying to get invited into the test trial, especially as many have received "invites" but not been able to get in anyway.

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I'm both fortunate and excited to be attending this year's DrupalCon in Chicago, as there is are a lot of new developments in the Drupal world that I want to become more familiar with, some of which I mention below.

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CiviCRM is a powerful, free and open source (AGPL-licensed) web-based contact relationship management (CRM) system that focuses on the needs of non-profits. A growing number of CivicActions' clients employ CiviCRM to support membership and contribution management, events, group mailings and report generation.

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On Sept 1, the FCC filed GN Docket No. 09-191 (Full PDF, Summary) which is a public notice opening a 30-day comment period on Preserving the Open Internet. This is a call for comments and proposals for policy changes that will affect what is commonly known as "Net Neutrality".

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We have a client that wanted to be able to process donations when the Credit Card's CVV numbers were not available. I had thought this field was mandatory, and indeed, CiviCRM's AuthorizeNet payment processor package requires it. But after talking with AuthorizeNet (the company) we discovered that the field is optional.

This is a useful trick that fellow CivicActions team member and CiviCRM wizard Matt Chapman showed me. Basically, the hook_civicrm_validate() function can be used to reset an error caused by a missing field. Here's the entirety of the civicrm_cvv module:

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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.

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