CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi Civis out there

We are working with civi in a couple of different settings. Always together with the great joomla! CMS. Because we used in our projects civicrm for membership sites and event management stuff, we would love to see the following features implementet in civicrm as a core functionality supported by further releases.

In the first step of this project we would like to evaluate the idea as whole and check if that should be a reason to follow the idea in the step of a concept, to estimate cost and check if we can develop it or sponsor the developpment.

The Vision is:
Imagine with CIVICRM that you can print/send out Invoices and Payment Confirmation Messages as PDF Attachments via Mail.
Payment Confirmations for an Event Fee would look like Tickets and it is possible to have a generated Barcode on the Ticket. On a certain Event it is possible to use this ticket with a barcode scanner. To send out pdf is a setting choosable for every event. Some parts of the pdf are easy changable for an admin (fonts, logo, some template setting etc.).

Generated PDF's are stored in a folder on the server, numbered and namend in a distinct way. You can send out PDF automatic via Mail or creating the PDF manually in the backend and print this out.

For ticketing it should be possible to choose information that you can put in a barcode. At least it should be the user's ID.
 

What do you think? Does this sound meaningfull? What would be your wishes for that? Have you any experiences with that?
Thank you for your comments..
best regards
Raphael

Hi there

We have a first idea how a simple solution for our idea could be check image below...
We made also first test with dompdf and the Mail Class of pear...

Do you have an idea where to start on the code to make this modification?

greetings
Raphael

Thanks Xavier

Looks like this was a Drupal only solution.
We will develop such a solution for joomla thats for sure! at the moment we are spinning around if we should make a module for civicrm called CIVIPDF for generating invoices, similar to CIVIMail.
It should be integrated in the whole workflow of the civievent modul and easy to handle...
If you have any requirements and ideas please ad this here..

thanks
Raphael

Seems like these features would be useful if they are part of core so both joomla/drupal folks can use it. Might want to consider extending CiviEvent to do these features and incorporate hershel's work in this

lobo

we now ship dompdf with civicrm and use it to generate pdf documents from html. its not a bad solution

lobo

Hi,

The code written for events' badge is fairly "generic" in the approach: you get the caller that does the job of fetching what's needed, gives it as a param to the pdf class, that does the layouting.
 
Each format is a different class that inherits the same parent, so you can more or less do whatever you want.

Not sure if the code can be reused, but the principle certainly can, and probably most of the configuration code.

X+

View the source, search for .tpl and follow from there is the default discovery pattern.

You might benefit to read a bit of overview on the implementation of CiviCRM:

http://en.flossmanuals.net/CiviCRM/DevelopIntro
http://civicrm.org/architecture

Check with  hershel to work together on it or at least get inspired on the code, will probably saves you time.

X+

Regarding the invoicing with CiviCRM: I already have clients using CiviCRM for sending email and paper invoices.  They are using the custom mail merge token called "contact.pending_payments" .  The code for that token was previously shared at http://civicrm.org/blogs/sgladstone/dealing-joint-greetings-part-2-code-provided

I have been working on some additional invoice-related  mail merge tokens ( such as total balance, etc ) that I am still getting client feedback on and making changes to.

They send the paper invoices by using the "Create PDF Letter" action and then use the "pending_payments" mail merge token.

What did you have in mind for invoicing?  I would like to work with other folks who also need invoicing.