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

The CiviCRM team invites you to CiviCon 2012
 
CiviCon – the annual conference for CiviCRM developers, implementers, administrators and users – is happening in the San Francisco Bay Area on April 2nd. Early bird registration is just $75 and ends less than a month away on January 30th, so reserve your spot now.


CiviCon is the annual CiviCRM event bringing together the people who develop, design, implement, administer, and use CiviCRM. We'll have great speakers, breakout sessions and panels highlighting real-world examples of nonprofits growing and sustaining relationships using CiviCRM. Find out about the future of the platform through discussions with the core team. You'll have ample opportunity to ask questions, meet other users and developers, make valuable connections, and get involved in the community.


 

Continuing our amazing productivity during sprints, we introduce our 9th and final sprint of the year. This sprint is being held at the offices of De Goede Woning in Netherlands from Dec 12th - Dec 16th. A big thanks to the sponsors  - De Goede Woning - for offering facilities, bosworX for installing WiFi and to Erik H and Erik B from EE-atWork for sponsoring the food, drink and accommodations.
This sprint we are trying something a bit different. In addition to the folks gathering in the NL, we will have a virtual sprint going on at approx the same time on the #civicrm IRC channel. Considering we have developers spread across different time zones (europe, india, US east coast, US west coast, new zealand), we should be going pretty good around the clock :) We'll have a virtual meeting on a daily basis @ 3:00 pm NL time (click on the link to find that time locally)
This sprint is focussed on these areas: Unit and Web Tests, Documentation, and CiviMobile.

We've been having a great gathering and an incredibly productive code sprint at wonderful Cawthorpe, UK. Thanx to Dave Moreton from Circle Interactive for organizing the logistics and making this event possible.

Over the past few weeks, at least 6 people have asked a very similar question on the forums. I want to extend the results from the Contact / Contribute / Member search form and display these fields instead of my least favorite fields. For example, users want to see the organization and job title of their contacts in the search form instead of country and post code. Or the total amount someone has contributed to the organization as part of the contribution search results. We had a few ways of doing this, but not very elegant.

I wanted to address and solve this during the code sprint. I looked at the code and initially came up with two hooks: one for the search headers and one for the search results. In a conversation with Kurund, we figured that one hook was a lot easier for downstream developers. I took a closer look and found an even better place to introduce the new hook: hook_civicrm_searchColumns. This will be part of 3.4.6

Basically, in the hook you modify the headers and values and inject / modify both the arrays as you see fit. The search templates currently are hard-wired to what it is going to display. So in some cases you might need to customize the search template also. You can work around this if you are keeping the same columns and overwriting the values in the array.

In the past three weeks, we worked with a client to build scheduled email reminders for activities in CiviCRM. Detailed project specifications are on the wiki at ARMS Project Home. We've added the following new features to CiviCRM as part of this work:

• We've extended Profile View/Edit to handle a combination of Contact + Activity + Custom Fields. Thus we can send a mailing with a link to a profile edit form and collect activity related details from the end user.
• Coleman W integrated a similar set of changes for CiviCRM WebForm v2. He also incorporated a bunch of other changes in the v2 version including the ability to create multiple contacts and create an associated activity. The new v2 UI is quite spiffy
• You can schedule a reminder email to be sent to a group of activities that meet a certain criteria. You can see the UI for this on our demo server (you will need to be logged in). The workflow allows you to send repeated reminders on a specified schedule. Emails can be based on message templates. A visual specification of this can be found on the wiki

On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week we had the a CiviCRM Code Sprint in San Francisco. We had a total of 9 participants over 2 days: Arthur from the WikiMedia Foundation, Micah from Electronic Frontier Foundation, Coleman and Brylie from Woolman - Sierra Friends Center, Peter and Adam from Giant Rabbit, Stacy from elMobile and Dave and Lobo from CiviCRM. Here are a few things that we worked on during the sprint.

• Peter from Giant Rabbit gave a demo of the CiviCRM install for Compass Point and specifically the event management system. One of the requirements was the ability to allow multiple people to sign up for multiple events at the same time. They developed a new drupal module that interfaces with CiviCRM event api and database. You can clone the code from their github repository. Peter has promised to blog about it in the next few weeks.
• Coleman gave an impressive presentation on the features coming in v2 of CiviCRM Webform. Some features include the ability to create/edit contact and activity data. The form creation process is now a lot slicker with some fancy AJAX goodness
  

This month we did some consulting work on a fairly large CiviCRM install (multiple civicrm sites, millions of contact records). One of the things that we liked about this work was it gave us an opportunity to go back and fine tune some features and make them more useful for this organization and hopefully the rest of the CiviCRM ecosystem. We are wrapping up the issues for this month and it seemed appropriate to recap how things went. It was quite nice to see how many improvements we have been able to incorporate into CiviCRM with this engagement. A list of all the issue and features can be found on our issue tracker. All these changes will be incorporated into CiviCRM v3.4.3 / v4.0.3 in the near future. Here are some of the highlights:

Our current support policy is to support and bug fix only the latest stable release of CiviCRM. This is primarily due to the amount of time and effort it takes to support multiple releases at the same time. As our user, integrator and developer base increases we expect this policy to change.

Both Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5 are fairly active releases with support for those releases expected to last for another 12 months or more (based on when the next version is released). However the next version of CiviCRM, v4.1, will only support Drupal 7.x and Joomla 1.6.x based on our current support policy.

We do understand that a large number of our users will still be on the older versions of Drupal and Joomla. If you are not planning to upgrade to the latest version of Drupal/Joomla, please contribute to the Make It Happen that will allow us to extend support for Drupal 6 / Joomla 1.5 for another release. This will ensure that these releases will be supported at least till Mar, 2012. Based on our current schedule, Drupal 6 / Joomla 1.5 will not be supported from Sep, 2011.

Update: We now have sponsorship committed for 63% of this project and have started a Make-it-Happen Campaign!

CiviEvent is the most popular CiviCRM Component. We get a steady stream of feature requests along with quite a few patches. We were approached recently by an organization that wanted to add Reminder Emails for CiviEvent.

We had a quick online and offline conversation with them and realized that there was a fair amount of cool integration so an event administrator could schedule and send messages to event participants. Briefly the set of features would include:

• Ability to schedule a mailing 'n' days before / after the event start date / end date OR on a specific date. This will allow an event admin to schedule a reminder email 7 days before the event and a thank you email 1 day after the event.
• Ability to decide who the recipient list is based on a combination or participant role (attendee, sponsor, volunteer) and participant status (Pending, Registered, Wait Listed, Cancelled).
• Ability to type the text/html message and subject or use a civicrm message template.
• Ability to include event information in the message as "civicrm mail tokens".
• Sending the event as a vevent/ical format used by exchange/gmail, so the recipient can register from within the mail

We held our second CiviCon in Chicago on Monday Mar 7, 2011 at TechNexus. We had an amazing turnout of 100+ community members. CiviCon 2011 was made possible by a great group. I'd personally like to acknowledge and thank the folks who made this possible...

• Young-Jin Kim and Matthew Vincenz from emphanos for being such great hosts and coordinating a large part of the logistics for the event.
• Mary Kay Bianchi and SNTial Technologies for helping with the logistics of the event and sponsoring drinks and food at the after party :)
• The Gold sponsors: Rooty Hollow, Ninjitsu Web Development, Web Access and CivicActions
• The Silver and Bronze sponsors for helping make the event happen.