This month we did a fairly complex migration for a customer of about 90,000 contacts to CiviCRM. I have been using Migrate module to do migrations for a while now but this time for the first time I used version 2 of the migrate module. I put up a how-to-blog on our site just before Christmans but Fen has inspired me to get on with sharing it more widely.

As many of you know with 3.4 & 4.0 a new API came out (APIv3). The new API had a number of improvements over the previous v2 including

We have a couple of customers who have been asking to be able to set-up recurring contributions against pledges. This seems to be a possibly contentious improvement so I'm looking for feedback on it.

The transition to Drupal 7 is probably the biggest challenge this year for the Drupal community. As discussed in previous blogs the intention has been that 3.4 would be the last release supporting Drupal 6. Unfortunately many sites aren't ready to upgrade to Drupal 7. The hidden risk of this is that if a sizeable portion of CiviCRM sites are not using 4.1 then the number of people testing, fixing & enhancing 4.1 will be much reduced. The cost of not having a drupal 6 release is likely to be higher than the cost of having one - even for Drupal 7 and Joomla! sites.

The target for the 'multiple contact subtypes' Make-it-Happen has just been reached thanks to a great bunch of donors.

A customer recently asked Fuzion  if the little contact search box in the top left corner could be made available on all their drupal pages and that it link to the contact's Drupal page.

Re-using the Civi-search box seemed a bit too difficult but there was a fairly easy solution to this request using existing drupal modules - finder + views (plus features to deploy).

Rumour has it that certain, ahem, consultants have been known to, on occasion, miss setting up the occasional CiviCRM cron, or not notice when the cron stops working on upgrade. Such consultants could wind up with egg on their face over crons. Somewhat less culpable are the CiviCRM newbies who didn't know their event waitlists wouldn't work or their memberships wouldn't roll over without the right cron.

It seems like time to give people a quick update as to what api v3 is about. API v3 will be shipping with CiviCRM 3.4 and basically it's like v2 but more so. Well, it's like bits of v2 api and all the other bits have been changed to be like those bits... make sense?