There are various CiviCRM events coming up in London this February, indeed there is 'something for everyone' regardless of your level of experience and familiarity with CiviCRM.  If you can't make it over to the US this April, you should definitley consider participating in one or more of these events...

For the past couple of years (since May 2009) we've used Flossmanuals to write our CiviCRM books. In August this year, our old faithful Comprehensive guide to CiviCRM became two: The CiviCRM user and administrator guide and The CiviCRM developer guide. The user and administrator guide is now in its fourth version and we're currently writing new training guides for administrators and developers. We are also experimenting with sector specific introductions and it feels like we are headed towards a pretty comprehensive set of documentation for CiviCRM.

This August 31st and September 1st we are running two CiviCRM trainings: one for developers and implementors and one for users and administrators.

We've just started a make it happen for UK direct debit integration - something that lots of UK non profits have been asking for and we are happy to provide :)

The fabulous Eileen will be carrying out the work and we are aiming to raise the total amount needed by August 15 in time for her trip to the UK so we can spend some time kick starting it all.

So if direct debit is important to you or your clients, please step up and help us reach the goal amount.

At the last user and admin training in London we decided to create exercise books to accompany the training. The idea was to move from an online format to a printed format, and we used the same tool that we use to create 'CiviCRM: a comprehensive guide': Booki.

We are super pleased to annouce CiviCRM developer and implementor training in London this May 18th and 19th in partnership with the CiviCRM core team.

We're very pleased to annouce that CiviCon is coming to London this August 22nd.

In the grand tradition of CiviCons, we've timed this one to co-incide with DrupalCon London (though we haven't gone quite as mad as they have with UK branding cliches).

A lot more that I thought, I found out at a I recent demo of CiviCRM at Simplify ICT, an event hosted in east London to boost the profile of free and open source software at non-profits.

I was getting bored with the standard intro to CiviCRM presentation (where I go through each module in isolation, giving an intro to what it can do and how it can be used) and wanted to do something more practical that non profits could easily relate to. So I ditched the standard presentation in favour of a practical demo showing CiviCRM in daily use. I settled on how does CiviCRM help me run an event? So the plan was:

• create a mailing list for people interested in events
• import some people, and add them to this mailing list
• create a mailing list sign up page, and get people in the room to sign up for events
• create an event with online registration
• get people to register

I scheduled in hour to demo all this, but we were was all done in 40 minutes! which left us a good 20 minutes for discussion at the end.

At the recent CiviCRM code sprint in Bristol I worked on developing integration between MaPit (a web service that maps postcodes and points to administrative area information for the UK) and CiviCRM.

Great news for CivICRM users in the UK. CiviCRM now comes with 'out of the box' support for Gift Aid.  The code is freely available for download, installation (instructions here) and use on your site.

Gift Aid makes use of two new features that we've added to core CiviCRM in 3.3, and as such you will need to upgrade your site to 3.3 to make use of this functionality. And what better way to be a part of the 3.3. release cycle!