CiviCRM configuration is largely driven through the web interface and the database: if an administrator wants to add a new "report" or new "relationship type", he can accomplish this with a few clicks of the web interface. The new item is inserted into the database and immediately becomes live. This is great for web-based administration, but it's inconvenient for developers: if a developer writes a module or extension that registers something in the database, then he needs to write an installation routine to insert the item (and an uninstallation routine to delete the item). CiviCRM 4.2+ includes a better way: use the API and hook_civicrm_managed. This technique is already used in "civix" based extensions, but it also works with Drupal modules, Joomla plugins, etc.

A few weeks ago, I went to CiviCon. As a fairly new end-user, this was an incredible experience. Not only did I learn an insane amount of information and receive a wonderful training at the User and Admin training, but I got to interact with other people that use CiviCRM in the same way I do.

At CiviCon San Francisco, and at the sprints that followed, we spent a fair amount of time on the subject of ‘CiviCRM as a self-sufficient and financially sustainable ecosystem’. These discussions were wide ranging and super interesting (thanks to Peter Petrik from Skvare for his input and help facilitating). Following from these discussions, we have set ourselves two high level goals for the next 3 years:

I started out with CiviCRM as an end user who installed it for organization where I used to work.  My colleagues and I were self-taught through trial and error, and after a little while, we understood the concepts and day-to-day contact management fairly well.  However, we lacked the opportunity to fully explore functionality before diving in and using it.

A small but very enthusiastic group came. We decided to move the meetup to the second Wednesday of each month. The location may alternate between Clearwater and Plant City, FL. Each person described their use of CiviCRM and many questions were asked and answered. Don Latshaw, fresh from CiviCon in SF presented "What's new in 4.3". There was an equal mix of Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress users. The next meetup will be June 12th and we'll look at CiviCase in depth.

G2 Crowd http://www.g2crowd.com/ is a web site that describes itself as providing business software reviews.

They are currently running a comparative review of CRM products http://www.g2crowd.com/categories/crm/compare in which they classify CiviCRM as a 'small business' CRM (but then Salesforce is also classified the same way, along with Workbooks.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM).

We have seen two recent breakthroughs for people who want to spend more time on implementing awesome websites and less time fiddling with hosting.

Coming off of CiviCon North America 2013, 25 members of the CiviCRM community spent a week at the Woolman Center working on new functionality, creating documentation, and discussing how to grow the CiviCRM community.  Based off initial seed funding of the Soft Credit Improvements Make-it-Happen by San Francisco Baykeeper, we fielded a team of five developers to begin development.  As of yesterday, a signifi

With the introduction of CiviAccounts in CiviCRM 4.3 the ground work to allow CiviCRM to cater for Tax against contributions has been laid.

During the week-long sprint in northern California following CiviCon, we've been working through the design and amendments required to complete the implementation of Tax within CiviCRM.

The specification can be found on the wiki