Hi All
Here at The Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research charity, a lot of events have participants who may be children or where a team leader is booking for all team members. The current implementation of CiviCRM insists on the inclusion of an email address for all participants, which is a problem in the two scenario's. Some of the teams are quite large and each team member has specific settings which need to be captured, such as t-shirt size, route etc.

We have continued the research to see how often someone tweeted about organisations that happen to use CiviCRM. We analysed 5988 tweets by 3478 users about 574 sites.

our twitter bot from TTTP (tweet civi) and and some new skills on R allowed us to get more graphs and updated information.

The team is excited to announce the third beta release for 4.1 with support for Drupal 7, Drupal 6, Joomla 1.7/1.6, and the integration with Wordpress 3.3 (wohoooo!!!).

Please remember this is a BETA release and it should NOT be used on production sites - however, we  strongly encourage everyone upgrade a copy of your current site(s) on a test server and let us know about any bugs or problems.
 

Thanks to a successful Make-it-Happen campaign the 4.1 release comes with a much improved and super flexible approach for running Civi's critical back-ground processing tasks. These tasks include keeping membership statuses up to date and sending renewal reminders, sending scheduled CiviMail mailings, sending pledge payment reminders, and more. I've spent the past 10 days testing and documenting the new "consolidated cron" functionality, and the good news is that I think it fulfills the promise of providing a convenient and friendly way to administer and run all the required tasks for a site.

The "bad" news is that these improvements are NOT backward compatible. The set of PHP scripts which were previously used to run these tasks have all been deprecated (and moved to a 'deprecated' directory). This means that all CiviCRM-related cron jobs will stop working as soon as any site is upgraded to 4.1. (Yes, a loud warning will appear on the screen at the end of the upgrade process.)

Notice to non-developers: This post is about how some functionality in 4.2 will be implemented in code and in the database, with very minor changes to anything visible through a browser. If you're not a developer, it probably won't interest you.

The first North of England meetup took place on the 12th of January 2012. It was really well attended with fifteen attendees. The attendess consisted of people interested in CiviCRM, users, implementers and developers. Some of these people had travelled quite a long way to get there and we were really pleased to see them.

For anyone who is using pricesets and/or automated recurring contributions with a payment processor, you will probably enjoy the 3 custom searches that you can download here
 

One of my favorite features in CiviCRM 4.1 is the improved support for custom tokens via hooks. It's really opened up the possibilities for building some great functionality and new workflows in CiviCRM. If you already know what tokens and hooks are, skip down to see some cool examples.

CiviCRM had a very successful year in 2011. The project grew significantly in different areas and we made progress on a few long standing issues. The biggest change in our opinion is the increase in community involvement across all aspects of the project.

• We had 1 major release  which supported Drupal 6, Joomla 1.5 (v3.4) and Drupal 7, Joomla 1.6 (v4.0). We also had 13 minor releases in 2011. A chart of the types of organizations using CiviCRM can be found here along with the usage of various components.

• We held the 2nd North America CiviCon in Chicago which was organized by Young-Jin Kim from  Emphanos. The 1st CiviCon Europe was held in London and organized by Michael McAndrew, Third Sector Design and David Moreton, Circle Interactive. Each of the conferences had 100+ attendees. We also held user and developer training, and code sprints around these conferences

During the december 2011 sprint in The Netherlands we discussed a different approach to the developer training sessions. We wanted to bring the approach in line with the user and administrator training sessions developed during the sprint following CiviCon London 2011. In short this means we do not try to focus on dealing with all aspects of CiviCRM but focus more on the needs of the participants. The aim is not to learn all there is to learn but to learn enough to get started.