civicrm

I recently upgraded CiviCRM for one of our clienst from 2.1.4 to 3.0.4 and learned a few tips that I'll share.  In most cases you just need to be sure to follow the instructions that CiviCRM provides and make all the intermediate upgrades along the way.  But In doing so, I ran into some frustrating problems, but through perseverence, ingenuity, and most important;y awesome support from Fen, Alex and Galaxy, I got around the problems and got the site upgraded.

Recently, during a civicrm upgrade to 3.x, a client asked for each civiMail click-through to not only be tracked for mailing reports, but to show up as an activity record for the user that clicks through. The main problem with doing this out of the box is that when civimail sends an email, it doesn't send any record (other than the email address) of who is receiving that email.

With the D7UC Initiative gaining steam and excepting brainstorming ideas, I figured it was a good time to map out my idea for Ubercart and CiviCRM integration. I realize that many may cringe at the mention of uniting these two applications, for all their complexities, yet I see it as critically important for many non profit organizations, and I'll explain why.

Many organizations that I have worked with want to take in money in two ways via the web:

I attended a CiviCRM Developers Training on the 9th and 10th of September in New York City along with about 20 others including four members of the CiviCRM core team (Donald Lobo, Kurand Jalmi, David Greenberg and Yashodha Chaku).  The sessions were a mix of existing site presentations, new CiviCRM v3.0 feature demonstrations, and hands on configuration and coding.

Recently, I was involved in a project here at CivicActions in which the client – a major university – wanted to to sell online courses geared towards high school teachers. These courses are intended to help school teachers incorporate more effective teaching techniques into their daily lesson plans. This client not only wanted the ability to sell these courses, but also wished to collect data from their customers that would allow the client to better target potential customers.

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.

This week I went to CiviCRM Developer Camp in London, UK. I must admit I've never used CiviCRM and downloaded and installed it for the first time the day before! The camp, which was un-conference in style, was held over two days, and over 20 people attended. It was meant to be a camp for experienced users, but given the varying degrees of knowledge of the people attending, I think it was less techy or advanced than originally intended.

When upgrading your CiviCRM site from 1.x to 2.x you might have to upgrade some custom modules. If you're upgrading to CiviCRM 2.1 or higher, this also requires that you're running Drupal 6. Upgrading your custom Drupal 5 modules for Drupal 6 is pretty easy: you simply download the coder module which will point out almost all required changes to your module with direct links to the documentation page about converting 5.x modules to 6.x. Upgrading your custom CiviCRM modules to be compatible with 2.x however won't be as easy since a bunch of functions have been replaced or removed. The idea is to motivate developers to use the internal API's directly and not use these helper functions anymore. There is a developer discussion about the API Migration from 1.x to 2.x and while it offers some indication as to what functions were replaced, it doesn't provide a valid alternative for all removed functions.

Here is a little tip that will make your life easier, especially the first time you go down the road of setting up CiviCRM's CiviContribute forms for a website where anonymous users will be making donations (not anonymous donations, just users that are not logged in). When setting up CiviContribute you need to grant access via the Drupal User Access to "make online contributions" to anonymous users, AND you also need to add an ACL to CiviCRM for "Everyone" to access the profile you are using for online donations.

Ron asked me for a little help on a side project where he was having trouble adding a link to a CiviCRM contribution form to a primary navigation menu. This is a pretty common requirement: you want a "donate now" link in your primary nav. You are using CiviCRM for donations. You figure, "I'll just add the civicrm contribution form url to the path field for my menu item." Well, unfortunately you figured wrong.