CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

1) Right now online contributions are just creating new contacts with the provided e-mail address as the name.  Is there a way to tie contacts to contributions online?

When an online contribution is made, we check for a "matching" existing contact. I believe we do this based on email address.

2) Is there a way to do a search that shows contacts that have not contributed in a certain time period?

There is no way to do this with "out of the box" searches. You'll need to look at using CiviReport / BIRT - and adopting one of the sample reports. Or, in 2.0 you should be able to create a custom search from our new framework (note that this will require some limited PHP and SQL expertise - but is fairly simple to "tack on"). Look for more info on this new feature soon.

3) And what file do you need to edit to make searching by cumulative donation possible?  I saw some code in this forum about that somewhere, but I didn't see an indication of what you needed to add the code to.

I think the forum post you're referring to was a "general approach" of adding a custom field and then creating some php code which does the calculations and writes cumulative values to the custom field via an API call (this code would need to be triggered by a cron job). I don't think anyone has actually implemented this or posted code for it yet. If you want to take this on and need more guidance - contact lobo or kurund via IRC.

I think that will work - but not sure how well it will scale (depending on the the size of your donor base - the "smart group" w/ static exclusions query may drag a bit). Also, you'll need to repeat the steps / recreate the group periodically since the the date ranges will be static.

The framework for creating custom searches that we're adding for 2.0 should help a lot with this - keep an eye on the blogs for details soon - and then you can play with it when 2.0 alpha is released (probably in early Jan).