Many Pies

Many Pies

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Sign Language Translation in Wycliffe Magazine

The Wycliffe UK magazine "Words for Life" is out and the focus this month is on Sign Language Bible translation.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Validating Direct Debits with Blackbaud NetCommunity

There's a bug in NetCommunity 5.1 whereby it lets your donor specify a one-time Direct Debit payment, which when it is brought through to RE doesn't work properly as it isn't a Recurring Gift.

In addition, we don't want the donors to do recurring credit card gifts as the current version of RE - 7.85 - stores Credit Card info in the database. (An upcoming PCI compliant release won't do this.)

So I've written a bit of Javascript to check the frequency and payment type and give an error message. Unlike my previous script, it doesn't have a hardcoded prefix which is needed to find the ids of some of the page elements. Instead it looks at a variable which is part of the donation form to get the prefix. This may mean it won't work in other versions of NetCommunity.

<!--//--><![cdata[//><!--
function xyzCheckDD()
{
var xyzPrefix = '';
var ErrorText = 'Please use \"One time\" frequency with credit cards, 1st or 15th with Direct Debits';
try{
//We look at one of the variables that's defined to find out the prefix for this page. If they go into four digits
// e.g. PC1001_ then this will need to change.
xyzPrefix = Page_Validators[0].controltovalidate.substring(0,6);

//Check frequency and Payment option. It doesn't have a unique id, so we find the checkbox, go up to the parent

bRecur = document.getElementById(xyzPrefix + 'Recurrence1_ddlFrequency').selectedIndex != "0";
bDD = document.getElementById(xyzPrefix + 'DonationCapture1_rdoPaymentOption_1').checked;
//This does an XOR - true if they are different
if( bRecur ? !bDD : bDD ) {
alert(ErrorText);
}
}catch(e){
// Put some debug here if required
}
}
function runit2(){
Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance().add_endRequest(xyzCheckDD);
}
runit2();
//--><!]]>

Monday, June 08, 2009

Wycliffe Staff Conference

We had our annual staff conference at the end of last week. The main part of the conference consists of reports from selected people on what they've been doing. As it happened I'd heard most of the people before for various reasons, but they all said some new stuff.

Afterwards we had discussion groups. One of the things that our group mused on was the fact that the speakers were saying how they were using ways of getting Bibles to people in non-print form (e.g. recordings and mobiles), because literacy rates aren't high. We commented how we are in what you could call a "post-literate" society, where people don't read much and so the same methods would be useful in getting the Bible into the hands of those who don't "consume" print media. The difference though, is that those in the UK who choose not to read have the opportunity, whereas those in countries where literacy isn't high don't have the opportunity.

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Supporting Deaf Sign Language translation

This is a bit old, but here's an interview with Dee and Shawn Collins about their involvement in Sign Language translation. We met Dee and Shawn when they came here a couple of years ago, so there's a personal interest in what they've been doing.