Helping Others Help Others

April 2014 CiviCRM Meetup: Fun with Maps and Calendars

The Dallas / Fort Worth CiviCRM Meetup group will be hosting another Meetup on Thursday, April 10, 2014. We will meet at Improving Enterprises at 6:30 p.m., but we suggest to arrive slightly earlier (6:00 p.m.) if you want to socialize. Allen Shaw will lead the discussion on CiviCRM's built-in mapping tool. While this mechanism is great for mapping event locations and calendars, it has other useful functions as well. We’ll survey modules and third-party APIs that allow you to add more dynamic information to your maps such as door-to-door ...
Read more

Understanding Views Relationships

Source: http://drupal.org/node/1578586 Relationships are used to allow Views to bring in data that is associated with the data already available in the view. A comment view could, for example, use the relationship comment: content to tap into data about the node for each comment. A term view could use the relationship taxonomy: parent term to tap into data from the parent term of each listed term. People comfortable with writing SQL queries will recognize the relationships as joins. You add, edit and delete relationships in the same way as filter ...
Read more

Tips For Using Measurements While Theming

px Measurements Some browsers handle certain measurements differently. If you set your margin to 20px (margin: 20px;), you may display your goal correctly in one browser; however, you may overshoot or undershoot your margins in another browser. The solution? You should only set widths, paddings and other styles with the “px” measurement if you’re making very small adjustments. Note: no more than 5px adjustments should be trusted with the px measurements. Code: CSS em Measurements Alternatively it is better to use em measurements, which are stable and consistent across all ...
Read more

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 ...
Read more

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 ...
Read more

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 ...
Read more

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 ...
Read more

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 ...
Read more

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 ...
Read more

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 ...
Read more