Blogs
It is possible to integrate CiviCRM with Xero - although the extension (purposefully) cannot be downloaded through the UI as it defintely requires someone technically savy to be involved in setting it up & maintaining it. In this blog I'm going to explain what you can expect and what you can't expect from the Xero integration. In order to get install and configure it you should refer to the Readme.
What you can expect to see?
A major challenge for CiviCRM implementers is migrating data from legacy systems into CiviCRM. For large datasets the front end import mechanisms time-out and don't allow for the complexity of the data.
A customer recently requested that the little contact search box in the top left corner be made available on all their drupal pages and that it link to the contact's Drupal page.
Re-using the Civi-search box seemed a bit too difficult but there was a fairly easy solution to this request using existing drupal modules - finder + views (plus features to deploy).
Table Wizard offers a quick & dirty way to get a csv into a Drupal mysql DB as a table. You need to start by downloading & enabling tablewizard and schema. Make sure you choose to enable the delimited import part.
You should then be able to navigate to admin/content/tw via the content menu and upload your csv file.
If you want the table available in views, However you need to access MySQL (e.g via PHPMyAdmin)
and add a primary key column e.g.
The joy of CiviMigrate is when you have a complicated destination for your data. In our example we have a simple csv with 6 fields but we want to create a Contact (see previous blog), a membership for that contact and an attached contribution record for the payment received. This blog will describe how to do a membership import and then a contribution import off the same data set.
This blog follows on very closely from the previous blog and continues the same example.
Prequisites
The Migrate module is a powerful tool for importing data into Drupal and Drupal modules. It is also an approach we have been using for large, complicated or recurring imports into CiviCRM. Some advantages of using Migrate module for imports:
NOTE: This approach has been superceded by our work developing the bridge module for using the Drupal Migrate module to migrate legacy data in to CiviCRM. Read about it here
Open Source projects often suffer from development ideas not getting sufficient resources to implement properly, with the outcome being lots of users continue to use work arounds or poor fixes.
Eileen has put some time in to setting up CiviCRM with a Make it Happen facility so that clients and consultants can make donations to particular projects. If the particular project does not get sufficient funding, then the donor has the option of a refund, or to shift it to another project.
Nice to see some praise for the Aus Greens site. From the ABC website http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2955511.htm