CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Greetings everyone,

I am an avid FOSS enthusiast, primarily concerned with developing and learning new possibilities that would help nurture and contribute significantly to the open-source community.

It will be very delighting to work with an open-source community, such as CiviCRM. I am very much interested to work , bond and network with new people having same charisma and enthusiasm. I would love to contribute my part to CiviCRM community, also I am looking forward to take and develop interesting UI projects for Google Summer of Code 2015.

My primary focus would be to work on CiviOffline. I would like to know some basic information about the working of CiviCRM core functionality. Following the description present on the ideas list which says client applications are programmed in HTML/JavaScript, also these tools can run on a tablet, netbook, laptop, etc. Could anyone brief me about the platform to be used here ? Are these client applications would principally be working on any modern web browser or there is need to develop a native mobile application ?

I am looking forward to hear from the community and their mentored thoughts on developing such application which can guide me to proceed further.

Thank you in advance.

Hi,

Thank you so much for providing me with such an insight. It feels great to hear back from the community.

When I thought of developing this offline client application at the browser end, I was going with HTML5  (playing around with cache manifest, local storage, running on local server) but in between the development process came the moment of realization that one needs to go through with some reconfigurations of the web server in order to gain control over the cache manifest file (made changes in .htaccess file) which I think one should not follow that while in developing terms and work ethics.

The idea of developing a native mobile app for CiviOffline seems more fair which can also serve as a subsidiary to Civi smartphone project (as in synchronising contact, address and daily log details) .
I think with the help of Apache Cordova, PhoneGap, eMobc or any other open source framework that seems fit according to the requirements and activities to be performed we can develop such an app.

Would initialise the development of a prototype which can bear the potential to work with an api provided by Civi server components for data access/modification.
Further I want to seek more community views and their thoughts that would help me gain more about this overall project.

Thank you.

Hi again,

I have come across the following shortcomings/downsides while working with cache manifest :

*When every time for the HTML5 webapp to run offline, the cache manifest is to be modified but the browser doesn't notices the changes until the cache manifest file has changed itself. For that to work one needs to make changes in the actual code in the file.

*To make the webapp cacheable certain reconfigurations are required in the web server. For example on an Apache based server one needs to modify the main server configuration file(httpd.conf) or certainly make a .htaccess file for the same.

*For the DOM events, when the cache manifest has changed then the browser will initiate downloading event and start re-downloading all the resources listed in the cache manifest.If in case the downloading was interrupted then cache manifest would give an HTTP error 404/410. If the cache manifest file fails to download then the process of caching the offline webapp will be unachievable.

By further more research for building an offline HTML5 webapp I came across a finer alternative to achieve the offline appcache functionality without the need of any .htaccess or server configuration file. This can be achieved by creating a .php file and set content type by using the PHP header function instead.
Below is the code showing how it is done :

//Code starts

<?php
header("Content-Type: text/cache-manifest");
?>
CACHE MANIFEST
# revision version

NETWORK:
*
CACHE:
//files


//Code ends

Also I am researching more into the web for developing an efficient way that will greatly help this project into a turning reality. Further on the sidelines I am focusing on gaining more about the civicrm-core codebase, also I have started adding more contribution on StackExchange sites and hope to submit/contribute more Pull Requests on issues.civicrm.org

Thankyou

Hi,

I am posting some progress updates on setting up development environment for CiviCRM. I have,
-git cloned civicrm-buildkit
-already had installed NodeJS, Apache Server and git (checked only for updates)
-installed CLI tools for CiviCRM.

Also I bit concerned about posting my major updates on civicrm.org blog, also I have registered an account on it.
Could someone help me out on how I can start blogging on civicrm.org Do I need some privileges by the system administrator to activate my blog so that I can proceed further ? or is there is an option in profile settings that I am missing out ?

I am eagerly waiting for the helping insights from the community.
Thank you.

Hi again,

Thank you for clarifying my doubts, as for now I will continue posting my updates on this post. Also I want to mention that currently I am going through the civicrm-buildkit documentation.
I am eagerly waiting for the program to commence.

Thanks.