CiviCRM Meetup -- Advanced Techniques for Contributions & Memberships

The latest CiviCRM Meetup, this last Thursday, was about an interesting topic to CiviCRM developers: Advanced Techniques for Contributions & Memberships. In preparation for the meetup, we built a demonstration and detailed how-to for this event. The complete how-to is available on Skvare's new Demonstration website at demo1.skvare.com. The use case for the demonstration is a national organization that collects additional membership fees, depending on the state residency of the member. We provide a method for doing so from a contribution form, using a CiviCRM module extension with PHP hooks and

How to Create a Entity Reference View

The Entity Reference module is a useful Drupal 7 module because it can be used to reference any entity from a field added to any other entity. For example, you can add an entity reference field to the Basic Page content type, which references taxonomy terms of vocabulary (bundle) tags. When you are creating a page and want to reference a particular term, it may help the user to see a custom format for the terms. By default the term name will be displayed for the terms that can be referenced. It may be convenient for the user to have a more detailed descprition of the term to make a decision

Understanding and Using Views Contexual Filters

Views Contextual Filters is a feature of the Views module that allows a Views to accept filtering from url or other inputs. This allows you to create lists that depend on conditional or user input. There are many reasons why you may want to filter a list based on url input. Take for example a list of articles. You may have many articles and wish to categorize them. In the case of this website, I'd like to be able to filter my article lists by the different Tags I give the articles. I have several taxonomy terms, CiviCRM, Drupal, and Integration. For this article, I am going to show how to

CiviCon 2014

CiviCon 2014 will take place April 24, 2014 and April 25, 2014 in San Francisco--less than five weeks away. CiviCon is the world’s largest CiviCRM Meetup. Each year CiviCRM developers gather to discuss the recent developments in CiviCRM. Skvare is a gold sponsor for CiviCon 2014. We're actively involved in the CiviCRM community, hosting Meetups and always contributing to the open-source community. In addition, Skvare’s own Peter Petrik and Mark Hanna will be there to give presentations and lead workshops. There will be a Pre-Conference Discovery Session, which will be hosted by Peter. For this

EVA and Entity Reference Use Case How-to

This article describes the building of a practical example use case using modern Drupal 7 modules and site building techniques. I will show how to use Views, EVA, Fieldgroup, Entity Reference, Entity Reference Prepopulate, and Display Suite modules to display content from multiple content types and other Drupal Entities on an article content type page. The goal is build a review system for the article content type. Modules Modules used in this how-to. Display Suite Display Suite allows you to take full control over how your content is displayed using a drag and drop interface. Arrange and

JQuery Modificaiton of CiviCRM Forms via CiviCRM Extensions

Have you ever wanted to modify a CiviCRM contribution or event registration page? Taken a look at those Smarty templates? Doesn't look pretty does it. In the article I describe how to easily add JQuery/javascript to any form you want and modify the page. First, and hardest of all, is create a basic CiviCRM extension. There is a program that will generate a basic extension that integrates with CiviCRM but doesn't yet add functionality. Create an Extension Visit the CiviCRM Wiki page for how to create a base Module Extension. http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC43/Create+a+Module

CiviCRM Meetup: Custom APIs and Mapping Tool

We recently arranged another CiviCRM Meetup in Dallas, Texas. We would like to thank Improving Enterprises for continued use of their facility and Skvare for continuing to organize the group. Mark Hanna led the discussion on CiviCRM’s mechanism that allows developers to create their own custom API calls. Developers can provide API calls in programming languages such as PHP, Javascript/Ajax, JSON and more. This is a useful feature in CiviCRM because it allows developers to efficiently pre-configure complex operations. Mark showed the group how to create a custom API call that retrieves a list

Managing and Arranging Stacked Blocks

To achieve specified design, you may need to make two blocks overlap. In Drupal, blocks are the spaces that hold the content we have put into them. This gives us the freedom to place them and then style them wherever on the page we need to achieve design. If the blocks are only for visual purposes, then this would be fine; however, if one of the blocks has a button or other hover/clickable functions, then this might be an issue, especially if that block is covered by the other. The solution? No matter how many blocks you have stacked up, there is a way to organize the order of which the blocks

Ongoing Gmail Outage

Due to an ongoing Gmail (and Google Apps) outage email communication to skvare.com may be delayed. Currently up to 50% of Gmail and Google Apps users are being affected over aperiod of several hours. For urgent issues, please call our team directly. Skvare's Drupal and CiviCRM web hosting services continue operating unaffected. It may be prudent to postpone sending out any bulk email via CiviMail or other third-party providers to avoid unexpected bounces or delays of delivery.

Override existing path with Path Redirect

When rearranging content sections that result in changed URLs, it is very important to remember that users may have bookmarked individual pages and the Google index will be pointing searches to a now defunct address. Several solutions exist, including mod-rewrite instructions in the .htaccess file. This is particularly handy for complex changes or a large number of addresses that need to be changed with a specific pattern. Drupal's Path Redirect provides an integrated solution with several useful options and tools. For example, the ability to view the last time a redirect was used is an