Change in our actions -> simple Personal Campaigns

[Nikolay Georgiev]

Hi friends,

because the status of the project is critical, we change our strategy.

First implement a working version of the proposal! It may not contain all features, but it should work!

That's why I think the easiest solution are the CiviCRM Personal Campaigns. There we have a Recognition Page and Share page. The Invited page is maybe missing, but we can skip this for the first prototype. Relationships between the True Fans and their friends can be represented by the CiviCRM donors. So I think we can cover about 70% of the functionality we are striving for.

So this will be our first effort - creating the Microfunding Proposal with Personal Campaigns!

Currently there is only one person working on that - Joe Hudson. If anybody would like to help him, please say so. He will create also a log file where he shares his progress.

Greetings,

Nikolay

-- 
Nikolay Georgiev
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Website: http://www.nikolay-georgiev.net/blog/
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Address: Darmstadt, Germany

[Thomas Levine]

Oops, I missed a few emails!

I don't really have a grasp of what has been going on, but I think the original proposal would have been outrageously simple if any of us had used CiviCRM before, and it doesn't look like we're planning on using the full capabilities of CiviCRM. We're already using MediaWiki. Why don't we just make a MediaWiki template?

Also, could anyone who did user testing with the wireframes share what they found? Or if nobody did, maybe someone should do that?

Tom

[Nikolay Georgiev]

Hi Tom,

MediaWiki is not suitable because:
- it does not save the data for every True Fan in a way, that it can be easily queried (see the Team Culturing as example).
- the user has to be able to write Wiki code or we have to engage some other people to do it for him/her. This takes additional human resources, time, communication and so on.
- you cannot send a message to all True Fans (we may need this in the future).
- Wiki pages can be changed by everyone, potential danger.
- I don't see way to create automatically the embeddable badge.

these are the first reasons coming to my mind.

What do you mean by user testing the wireframes? And why it is a needed effort now?

Greetings,

Nikolay

[Thomas Levine]

I was wondering about user testing because I hadn't seen much discussion about who will be using the site and how and why. Because of this, I don't really know what is needed, but MediaWiki seemed appropriate based on what I read on the microfunding proposal on the wiki. As for the concerns that you itemize

• Templates are quite structured.
• The templates can be populated with a form.
• Make a True Fans mailing list. Populate that with the aforementioned form.
• You can protect MediaWiki pages.
• I don't know what the badges are supposed to do, so I can't say much about whether the badges can be created automatically. But I suspect that this is quite possible.

That said, I don't really know what is needed, so I'm not entirely confident that MediaWiki would be fine as a final version. But I'm sure it'll do as a low-fidelity prototype.

[Nikolay Georgiev]

No, MediaWiki will not be enough. I want to close this question and concentrate on the current effort. If you nevertheless think MediaWiki is a better choice than Drupal, we could discuss this further.

Tom, you are doing the badges! It is very simple and you should already know what an embeddable badge is. If not, I can answer it again. By automatically creating a badge, I meant a way in which you are not involving human effort for the creation of the embeddable badge.

What is the status, could you use the CiviCRM API to get the first and last name of the True Fans?

Greetings,

Nikolay

[Thomas Levine]

How ironic that I don't know what the badges are! I understand what you asked me to build for the badges, but I don't know what the badges are beyond that.

I didn't play with getting the relevant information from the CiviCRM API. Attribute that to busyness or laziness or whatever. Anyway, this is why I say that the project would be outrageously simple if I'd ever used CiviCRM before.

Aside from Michael, who seemed a bit too busy to help much, is anyone comfortable with the CiviCRM API? Maybe we could have one person write all of the CiviCRM API calls (My guess is that this is like twelve lines total for the whole project.) so we don't all have to learn them.

[Michael McAndrew]

Hey there,

I am back from business and able to help again if you have any specific questions.  Was meaning to get round to telling you I am available again and now seems like a good time to do that.  Let me know if and how I can help.

Michael

--
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tel: 020 7183 5828
mob: 07817 802299

Third Sector Design Ltd.
http://thirdsectordesign.org

[Nikolay Georgiev]

Tom, that's it :) Nothing more. It is what you are implementing here:
http://microfundingtest.openfarmtech.org/mywebsite.php

We need to show the first and last name of the person. And that's it. Then everyone can embed this badge on every website. And because everybody can embed it, we should implement like youtube with iframe or javascript, so that it is harder (though still possible) to manipulate the HTML we are giving as a badge.

great! Michael can you help Tom with the badges. We need to make a CiviCRM API call to get the first and last names of the True Fans. Tom can explain you more.

Nikolay

[Thomas Levine]

Hmm well let's ignore temporarily whether I understand what the badges are while I explain what Michael could do.

1. Given that a user is logged in, get the user object
2. Given a username, get the user object
3. Given a user object, get the first name, the last name and whether the user is a true fan.

I'm not sure where we are storing whether the user is a true fan. I thought it was the user role in the Drupal database, but that was before I realized that CiviCRM used a different database and API. Here is how I got username and role for all users in the Drupal database.

use microft;select users_roles.uid,name from users inner join users_roles on users.uid=users_roles.uid where rid=3;

Drupal 7 does have an ORM, but I didn't play with it because using SQL was easier for me.

Also, if you want to use the Drupal database on the test installation, you'll need to edit the settings file or explicitly use it.

Tom

[Joe Hudson]

Hi all,

I've been evaluating CiviCRM Personal Campaigns extension for creation of OSE microfunding share and recognition pages.

My conclusion after creating a campaign page and reading through the extension documentation is that it would take at least as much work to adapt this Personal Campaigns extension to the basic needs of this project as to built the required functionality out of other Drupal modules; with the later being preferable due to it being more in harmony with the Drupal way of doing things (and thus easier to maintain with Drupal updates).

The reasons for this view are:

* Inflexible structure of Campaign pages, with the focus on reaching a target sum, no video field, campaign start and end dates.

* Complexity of Campaign forms, lots of unnecessary details that would overwhelm a lot of people.

* Modifying Campaign page structure and elements would involve modifying the CiviCRM extension, something which many fewer people will have skills in, compared to regular Drupal module development. (New data fields can be added through the interface, but these are intended as attributes of individuals, rather than recognition page elements, such as videos.)

* The features which it provides are readily available in a combination of popular Drupal 7 modules: Invite, User Relationships, Lm_paypal.

I propose starting by creating a custom content type using CCK node fields, with a custom module to integrate existing community contributed modules which provide the main blocks of functionality. I believe the time needed to create a bare bones functional solution, which users can feel confident using, would be less than that required with the Personal Campaigns approach. CiviCRM would still be used for storing the user/fan specific data.

If there is a volunteer who is an expert CiviCRM developer, they may wish to differ with what I've written above. Otherwise I suggest not using the Personal Campaign extension for a quick and dirty implementation. 

Regarding video integration, there is the Media: Youtube module which appears to allow uploaded videos to be saved on youtube and then automatically embedded on a page. 

Unless there are objections I will start on the above plan immediately. 

(I know it would be great to see something working soon, however after an initial evaluation I don't think pursuing the Personal Campaigns extension would be time well spent.)

Warmly,

Joe

[Nikolay Georgiev]

okay,

I we would need the opinion of someone with CiviCRM experience here.
Eduardo, what are your thoughts?

If we go only Drupal, my suggestions for the Share and Invited page was
a new content type "Invitation" with Text and Video. You can create
"Invitation" pages very easily like a blog post, they will be publicly
visible with unique URL. The open points here were - 1) Recognition
page, 2) PayPal subscription and the relations between the True Fans.

Greetings,
Nikolay

--

[Joe Hudson]

just to clarify, I believe CiviCRM is still a good choice for maintaining the details of Truefans, just not for providing the interface for the various front end and media related elements of this project.

Remember also if you choose a CiviCRM extension based solution you will need a set of people with expertise in CiviCRM development, willing to maintain and extend it. I believe these are much rarer skills than regular Drupal development.

Regarding invitation content type, I think that's a good idea. Something like the Media module could be used to allow selection from previously uploaded videos (as well as new ones).

lm_paypal should handle recurring payments, and User Relationships via a block should handle TrueFan connections.

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[Nikolay Georgiev]

Eduardo,

what are your comments for Drupal vs. CiviCRM?

Let's come up in agreement in order to continue the work.

Nikolay

[Nikolay Georgiev]

I hope Eduardo can comment soon on the concerns and suggestions below. I will repeat them:

CiviCRM:

* Inflexible structure of Campaign pages, with the focus on reaching a target sum, no video field, campaign start and end dates.
* Complexity of Campaign forms, lots of unnecessary details that would overwhelm a lot of people.
* Modifying Campaign page structure and elements would involve modifying the CiviCRM extension, something which many fewer people will have skills in, compared to regular Drupal module development. (New data fields can be added through the interface, but these are intended as attributes of individuals, rather than recognition page elements, such as videos.)

Durpal

* The features which it provides are readily available in a combination of popular Drupal 7 modules: Invite, User Relationships, Lm_paypal.

* creating a custom content type using CCK node fields, with a custom module to integrate existing community contributed modules which provide the main blocks of functionality.
* CiviCRM would still be used for storing the user/fan specific data.
* A new content type "Invitation" with Text and Video for the Share and Invited page. You can create "Invitation" pages very easily like a blog post, they will be publicly visible with unique URL. The open points here were - 1) Recognition page, 2) PayPal subscription and the relations between the True Fans.

Nikolay

[Eduardo Riesco]

Hi everybody,

Excuse me for not responding earlier.
I have the same doubts as Joe; I see the same problems with CiviCRM. But I think getting CiviCRM integration could have global and future advantages.
I don't know how difficult overcome this problems is, but I personally would like to review it. Maybe Michael could say something about this.

An invitation content type with some php code pulling data from CiviCRM using its API should be easy to do, but integrate Lm_PayPal Drupal module with CiviMember could not be easy.

I'm going to review CiviCRMPersonal Campaign Pages integration as soon as possible.

Any idea Michael?

[Joe Hudson]

Just to keep everyone informed of my availability for working on this. From Thursday until Monday I'll be away. Then again from 18th-23rd. I'd like to be able to get going before Thursday.

Eduardo what difficulties do you see with recording a paid event in CiviCRM from a paypal IPN event that Lm_paypal module picks up?

Joe

[Eduardo Riesco]

I don't know exactly what difficulties we can find. I only say that
it's easy to read data from the database but when we write we must be
very careful for not get an inconsistent database state.

Edu