Various musings and occasionally some useful code.
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Spending a couple of days in London

Posted Tue, 23/06/2009 - 08:18 by chris

Right now I'm sat in a nice little meeting room whilst doing the intros to the next couple of days' worth of CiviCRM discussions. We have people here from charities, core developers and various other orgs.

Will be tweeting things as I go through and any significant findings will be posted here or another blog post.

Give it up for the CiviCRM core team

Posted Tue, 16/06/2009 - 08:42 by chris

I had to do some big changes (or so I thought) on the contact search recently. I needed to be able to choose the fields in the results view and also display memberships. It turns out that the field chooser already exists and is little used. The next thing was the memberships which did need a bit of of hacking but generally I was impressed and managed to get it working in just a few hours. Without all the base code working so well it would have been days I reckon. Cheers.

Stan's Cafe 24hr Scalextric

Posted Sun, 14/06/2009 - 15:44 by chris

I've just returned from the finale of the 24 hour scalextric event held by Stan's Cafe over in Hockley. I uploaded my pics to flickr if you want to see a piece of the action: http://www.flickr.com/photos/13818233@N04/sets/72157619644945761/

The original Stan's Cafe event page is here if you want the full info. We're just waiting on the processig of the audio so we can listen again on rhubarb radio http://www.rhubarbradio.com/live/events/24-hour-scalextric.aspx

Had a great time and it makes me want to go and get some scalextric myself to relive my youth. Red mini FTW!

Fazeley Mind Map - My Dad's on Twitter

Posted Sat, 13/06/2009 - 09:02 by chris

I was recently involved with part of the Fazeley Digital 09 event. This is the recording live from the 'My Dad's on Twitter but He Doesn't Know Why' night. We had good fun but with this clip you need to fast forward a little way before you get to the actual start of the event.

CiviCRM - Ideas for future development

Posted Sat, 06/06/2009 - 11:14 by chris

There is an official page on civicrm's wiki site to document many of the possible changes for civicrm v3.0. As a result, this page is simple a brainstorm I'm working on and not an indication of any comfirmed features for civicrm.

Disclaimer out of the way, time for some ideas. I have been working closest with the events system which will probably skew the focus of this page. I'll start with the list I've slowly been adding to.

New site up and running

Posted Sat, 30/05/2009 - 19:22 by chris

I finally can say that the biggest, most complicated site I have ever worked on has gone live. It's not finished but nothing ever seems to be. It's a great feeling after about 6 months solid development time. I have a lot of people to thank, especially Donald Lobo from CiviCRM.

It's been a long job but I'm sure it'll be worth it. I've written a little bit about what I did over at civicrm.org for those that are interested here http://civicrm.org/node/573

I guess now all I need to do is wait for feedback and try and get the remainder done.

Thanks all,
Chris

Staying Focused

Posted Fri, 15/05/2009 - 22:05 by chris

Writing this on my birthday just to be a martyr. I'm close to the end of a rather large project, based on the size of the majority of our jobs and I've found, over the course of the last six months that it is so much easier to get work done at home.

I was wondering what was causing the distractions and I'm still no closer to getting an answer. I think the office is a great place to be but when I really need to concentrate there is no way I manage to do it at my usual desk.

Using FCKeditor and Image Assist from Drupal

Posted Wed, 13/05/2009 - 21:58 by chris

Firstly, congratulations all the book sprinters. You did well. I'll be having a good read of it this weekend.

Before I delve into some code I'd like to give you my motivation for doing what I'm about to describe.

I need image uploading, ease of use and consistency. I also don't want to bother with maintaining 2 versions of fckeditor. I knew it shouldn't be too hard to get it working across to 2 systems and to be honest it wasn't. It took a little more to find out what the Image assist module needed though.

A nice feature of fckeditor is that we get a nice button in the editor toolbar instead of the link below the textarea as it would normally be. To get fckeditor and image assist working in drupal together you will need to copy img_assist_fckeditor.js from fckeditor module folder into img_assist folder. If you get a white empty popup screen then you have missed this step out.

On to some actual coding. Please make sure your drupal modules are all working before trying this for your own sanity's sake.

And in Local News...

Posted Sun, 10/05/2009 - 13:16 by chris

Catching up on tweets from earlier today I notice a link that @podnosh mentioned about very local media. You can read the post here for more info. Essentially with the demise of local papers etc social media has stepped in, in Lozells. The question is, how long can it keep going?

After reading it, I wanted to find out more about my local area of Kings Norton so these are my findings.

Social Media Surgery - Fazeley Studios - April

Posted Tue, 21/04/2009 - 07:38 by chris

Just a note to all in the voluntary or charity sector, the next social media surgery for the Birmingham area is to be held in Fazeley Studios, Digbeth on Wed 22nd April '09. It's free and relaxed. Hope to see you you there. Thanks to Nick Booth from www.podnosh.com for organising again.

Q: What is a Social Media Surgery?