Last week Kurund, Michael, Mari, Xavier and I spent 2 days in the UK training camp and 1 day at the user camp. We had a great turnout at both camps with a 18 participants in the training camp and 8 participants in the user camp.

Training Camp

The training camp was held over two days. Similar to our other camps this was also in an unconference format. The topics were decided by the participants and we split the day up into 5 sessions on both the days. Some takeaways from the user meetup:

• The UK NGO's rely more on government funding than on donations.
• Reporting and managing gift aid is important. We sketched out an implementation and a custom report for this on the wiki. More code on this coming soon
• Folks were quite excited about CiviReport and the reporting framework.
• Quite a few discussions on effectively supporting multi-org installations (n drupal installs, 1 shared civicrm db)
• A good discussion on how to make CiviCRM get around the "not built for UK (insert your favorite country here)" discussion. At some point in the future we should set better defaults given the installation country rather than only one set of defaults worldwide.
• How to extend and modify CiviCRM via hooks was a popular topic. We definitely need to post more examples and add even more support for this in future versions.
  

Those that missed out on the last three days of CiviCRM fun in London (and those for whom three days just wasn't enough) will be pleased to hear that this July's London Net Tuesday will be focused on CiviCRM. Nic Rodgers from Enable Interactive and I will be there to answer your questions and talk about how organisations in the UK and further afield have been using it.

Two key usability goals for the upcoming 2.3 release are:

• Reduce the number of "clicks" needed to move around in CiviCRM
• Allow sites to optimize CiviCRM navigation for the way they use it

We've been working hard on the new navigation system - and it's now ready for folks to try it out on the 2.3 sandbox.

Login as usual with:
user = demo
password = demo

... and click CiviCRM on the Drupal navigation block.

Here at raSANTIAGO we are entering our third year with CiviCRM and still find ourselves struggling to make desired changes to the codebase. Too often we have expressed desired to re-architect and re-factor the CiviCRM. Recently we have completed two major projects that had us deeper in the codebase then before and realizing that we had to stop complaining.

The Craigslist Foundation held their annual Non-profit Bootcamp this Saturday in Berkeley. This event brings together more than 1,500 people who are "passionate about changing the world". The opening keynote speaker was Arianna Huffington - who shared some wonderful stories about the importance of volunteering in improving our own lives along with the lives of folks we're helping.

I had the opportunity to participate in a panel on "Future Tech", along with Peter Deitz from Social Actions, Rayma Raghavan from YouTube, and Marnie Webb from Techsoup / NetSquared. Their was a nice turnout for the session (maybe 125+ folks). My goal was to get the audience excited about investigating open source tools by explaining the benefits of the open source model and the alignment between open source development and non-profit process and values. Of course I also spread the word about CiviCRM and some of the cool implementations folks are doing.

You can download my presentation slides from our wiki. Feel free to re-use, re-mix etc. :-) You can also read some more about our session, as well as some of the other happenings at the boot camp on Beth Kanter's blog.

Support desk blog: How to collect organization / household information via drupal's "My Account"

This blog post is courtesy of IRC user (huf, Mihaly Berenyi). The question is how do you get a permisioned user to edit organization information from the Drupal My Account Page. The answer surprising is quite simple :)

• Create an organization profile and check "My Account" in the used for settings
• Ensure that the user's relationship with the organization is permissioned, i.e. the user has the permission box checked to edit the organization
• Apply the patch at the end of this post

I have two kids who started school late last year in San Francisco. I've been getting more involved with the school and their education and have been noticing the lack of open source software in most of the school operations. In the great open source tradition of scratching your own itch, this summer i'm looking at building a few modules. These seem applicable to a lot of schools and figured it might make more sense to do some research into whats available out there.

To clarify some terminology:

CMS - Content Management System like Drupal or Joomla
CRM - Contact / Constituent Relationship Management System like CiviCRM
SIS - Student Information System like SchoolTool or Open Admin
LMS - Learning Management System like Moodle

Parts of this post have been extracted from the discussion Drupal/CiviCRM as a SIS (student information system). I also chatted with Tom Hoffman about SchoolTool and SIS on the schooltool irc channel.

The team has released version 2.2.6 with approximately 35 bug fixes and improvements. Notable fixes and improvements include:

• More CiviCRM - Views2 integration/fixes
• Renew Membership fixes ( CRM-4555,CRM-4556 )

You can review a complete list of 2.2.6 changes on the issue tracker.

Download

You can download CiviCRM 2.2.6 at our download page. Select from the civicrm-stable section. The filenames include the 2.2.6 label: civicrm-2.2.…. Be sure and download the correct version for your CMS (Drupal / Joomla! / Standalone).
 

In my last blog post about multi-org, I made the case for merging groups and relationships as an elegant solution to the multi-organization data modeling requirements. My thinking boiled down to:

1. Groups represent a relationship between "you" (i.e. one of the owner organizations of that Civi instance) and a contact (i.e. a member, newsletter subscriber, media contact, alumni, etc.).
2. Relationships represent a relationship between 2 external contacts.

So, under multi-org there would be more than one "you" for the first scenario above, and I thought well, let's just piggyback on the existing many-to-many data model we have for relationships. However, this proved too drastic a change to make it into 2.3, so we (I and the core dev team) went back to the drawing board.

As mentioned previously, we’re introducing quite a few new CiviEvent features in CiviCRM 2.3. Most of them are still undergoing our internal CiviCRM QA cycle, but do check them out at our CiviCRM 2.3 sandbox if you’re interested (there is still time for some minor fixes to accommodate your use-cases!).