GSoC 2020 with CiviCRM — Integrating CiviCRM with LibreOffice
CiviCRM is web-based, open source, Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) software geared toward meeting the needs of non-profit and other civic-sector organizations. As of 2019, over 11,000 non-profits use CiviCRM. CiviCRM is a flexible platform that allows users to manage a range of interactions including donations, events, memberships, activities, cases, campaigns, mailings and more, all located in a single system that integrates tightly with popular open source content management systems (CMS).
Project Description
The goal of this project is to develop an extension to connect CiviCRM with LibreOffice in order to write a Letter to a contact/contacts with LibreOffice instead of using PDF-Letter. The extension should also work with LibreOffice Calc and Microsoft Excel to obtain contribution details.
Project link: https://github.com/veda-consulting-company/uk.co.vedaconsulting.module.wordmailmerge
Used technologies: TinyButStrong, OpenTBS
Project implementation
LibreOffice Writer Mail Merge
From my mentor’s guidance I have found an already developed extension which performs mail merge operation using Microsoft Word instead of LibreOffice Writer (https://github.com/veda-consulting-company/uk.co.vedaconsulting.module.wordmailmerge). As this is an open source solution I use that extension and integrated LibreOffice writer on top of it,to make it as a more powerful solution.
To achieve LibreOffice Writer mail merge i did the following:
- I created my own fork of the uk.co.vedaconsulting.module.wordmailmerge repository.
- Resolved the issues in the extension to make it work with the CiviCRM latest version 5.26.0
- Enhance the extension to perform mail merge with LibreOffce Writer.
Ms Excel & LibreOffice Calc Mail Merge
As the next step I enhanced this extension to work with Ms Excel and LibreOffice Calc to obtain contribution details.
Code Link
Blog post
https://civicrm.org/blog/asha/gsoc-2020-civicrm-mail-merge-libreoffice
Acknowledgment
Finally I would like to thank my mentor Parvez Saleh for helping me out throughout the project. He helped me when ever he could without any hesitation. Working with CiviCRM was really an amazing experience.
Last but not least, I would like to thank Google for providing this opportunity to explore the open source software through the “Google Summer of Code” program.