A Conceptual Roadmap for Ubercart CiviCRM Integration

With the D7UC Initiative gaining steam and excepting brainstorming ideas, I figured it was a good time to map out my idea for Ubercart and CiviCRM integration. I realize that many may cringe at the mention of uniting these two applications, for all their complexities, yet I see it as critically important for many non profit organizations, and I’ll explain why. Many organizations that I have worked with want to take in money in two ways via the web: Accepting Donations or Memberships Selling stuff: tickets to events, reports, workshops, classes, books, etc… Nonprofit organizations have reporting requirements (internal and often external) as well as data management requirements. Put simply they want to know who gave them how much money, for what, and when, so that they can ask again. CiviCRM is great at the first: accepting donations and membership payments. It does all of the automated receipt sending and reminder emails that you would expect. It can even do “premiums” (special gifts) based on donation thresholds and write receipts for the tax deductible portions. It is really great. CiviCRM can also sell tickets to events, however it really is designed for events, not necessarily classes, courses, workshops, etc… or events with fixed seating (think theater performances). Lastly, CiviCRM is not setup to sell physical products or downloads in any way other than as premiums for donations. CiviCRM also brings with it CiviMail, a pretty robust mass mailer, and some good reporting features. Ubercart is great at selling physical things, decent at selling digital things, and hopefully will get better at selling temporal things (classes, workshops and events). Ubercart2.x...

Installing Drush On Dreamhost

Outside of CivicActions I host some sites for friends and family on Dreamhost.  I’ve always had a decent experience with DH for the kinds of sites I am talking about, especially for the price.  Today I decided to get Drush installed. The first thing I did was ask on the drupal-seattle IRC channel if anyone had done it.  Thinkling (Maarten) directed me to this post on Drupal.org. It is pretty straight forward, but I figured I would spell it out with a little bit more information. So here are the steps you must take: SSH in to your dreamhost account $ wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drush-All-Versions-2.1.tar.gz $ tar -xzf drush-All-Versions-2.1.tar.gz $ mv drush drush_2.1 $ alias drush='/full/pathto/drush_2.1/drush' $ pico .bash_profile Then add the following two lines to the end of your .bash_profile export PATH=/usr/local/php5/bin/:$PATH alias drush='/full/pathto/drush_2.1/drush' Save your file. This presumes that drush_2.1 lives in your user root directory, you would have to change the path if it lived elsewhere. Your full path will look something like: "/home/username/drush_2.1/drush". Here is the step that will save you a little bit of headache and worry: LOGOUT.  Terminate your SSH connection.  And then log back in. OR you can run $ source .bash_profile You can then type drush at the command line and it will work (give you a list of commands).  Of course you will want to run it from your drupal root. Check out Owen’s blog post for more information and a video tutorial of Drush.   UPDATE: It is worth noting, the reason to rename the drush directory something else is because you cannot have a symlink with the same name as...