CiviCRM

Setting up the CiviMail return channel is a notorious pain in the ass. The return channel is the mechanism by which email is passed back into the CiviMail system. It's necessary to allow replies and bounces to be handled by CiviCRM, making it fairly essential to the successful use of CiviMail.

The official way of setting things up is unfortunate in a couple of respects: it requires the installation of a customized version of the amavisd-new content-filtering daemon*, and it cannot handle multi-site installs. The "alternative" return channel implementation, although rumoured to not scale as well, requires no additional software, and can be easily adapted for servers hosting multiple domains that use CiviMail.

In recent months we have been transitioning from Fedora Core systems to Debian ones. Our standard install is Debian stable "Etch", and the standard slate of packages serves almost all our needs admirably.

With one exception.

CiviCRM 2.1, which is (barely) still in alpha requires PHP version 5.2.1+, and the version that comes with Debian stable is 5.2.0. The way around this is to install the Debian packages from the testing distribution, which currently offers the latest 5.2.6 version of PHP.

The CiviLingua project was an attempt to build i18n/l10n into CiviCRM core in the late 1.6 / early 1.7 release era. Details are available on the CiviCRM wiki:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviLingua+-+support+for+multi-lingual+sites

And in my earlier blog posts:

I've recently come through a downright purgatorial effort to get some sort of IDE debugger set up for my Drupal work. Hopefully the notes below will help other folks from running into some of these same problems.

Environment

Enterprise installs of GNU/Linux promise well-supported and rock-solid combinations of software packages.The problem with upgrading the software on an Enterprise install is that the built-in program management system only lets you upgrade and install the limited selection of packages and versions that make up that particular distro.*