GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS

GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Philippe Gervaix

Implementor

ISHR

http://www.ishr.ch

ISHR is currently in the early stages of implementing CiviCRM, and is finding the customisable aspects of the software to be especially beneficial.
GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
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Amy Bucaida

Administrator

Missouri Credit Union Association

http://www.mcua.org

We are a full CiviCRM install with Drupal.
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Michal Mach

Core Team Member, Developer, Implementor

CiviCRM, Caltha

http://civicrm.org

I've always been passionate about what non-profits and advocacy groups can achieve using technology. For me, CiviCRM shows an essential example of how non-profit and technology worlds can come together to provide real change - working as community, creating value for yourself, but also for others in non-profit sector.
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Richard Hunter

Administrator, End-user

AustLII

http://www.austlii.edu.au

AustLII is the leader in the free access to law movement and has a philospophical bias towards open source systems. After investigating all the other possible major alternatives it seemed logical to turn to CiviCRM. We have software developer resources, and though it is not core business, we may be able to direct some of these resources towards improving CiviCRM for the community.
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Yashodha Chaku

CORE TEAM MEMBER

WEB ACCESS INDIA PVT. LTD.

http://webaccessglobal.com

Its great to work on a project that has a profound impact on non profits. I am very excited about the work we do on CiviCRM which involves building on each other's ideas to create best of breed solutions for non profits. The fact that CiviCRM is an open source project with an amazing community and dedicated developers is an icing on the cake.
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Allen Gunn

Ally, FanBoy

Aspiration

http://aspirationtech.org/

By giving the nonprofit sector a values-driven, free/open source solution for CRM needs!
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Allen Shaw

DEVELOPER

NS WEB SOLUTIONS

http://nswebsolutions.com

I'm quite impressed with the responsiveness of the CiviCRM community, both from the core developers and many experienced users who have quickly provided answers and ideas in areas where I just needed that extra insight, or where we needed to do something totally new. After several years working with open source software, I'm finding the CiviCRM community to be the most responsive and helpful I've seen.

We make CiviCRM one of our primary offerings because it just provides so much right out of the box that our clients need, without a line of custom code. And when we need to extend it for the clients' unique needs, the APIs and programming hooks let us add in features that would be impossible in some other systems. This means we can provide great value to our clients with quick turnaround times and reasonable budgets, which is great for our clients and for us.
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Eileen McNaughton

Developer and End-user

Fuzion

http://fuzion.co.nz

CiviCRM has one of the most active and friendliest communities I have come across. From initial tentative forum posts I was encouraged into engaging more actively through IRC and directly with other groups & individuals and am now happy to count many community members as friends. I recently found an article on the web that said if you post a question about CiviCRM anywhere on the web Lobo will post an answer within a few hours. It often feels like that is true.

One of the most valuable way in which the community supports me is by allowing me to bounce my ideas around and often someone is able to suggest an approach which is better than mine.
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David Moreton

Consultant

Circle Interactive

http://www.civisites.com

We help many not for profits implement CiviCRM through consultancy, training, configuration and custom development. Many of them come from a painful world of old Access databases, multiple spreadsheets and even paper. It's really satisfying to
help people move on with a system that's so much in tune with their own ethics of sharing and collaboration. We also 'eat our own dog food' and use Civi in-house for our client records because we love the flexibility and control it gives us.

For us it's important to share code and advice with other members of the community when we can because we know we get it back in help at other times. The community really is awesome and one of the friendliest and undaunting I've come across. We appreciate the huge value of the software to us and our clients so we try to contribute back and make it even better.
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David Greenberg

Core Team Member

CiviCRM

http://civicrm.org

I find the engagement with our community of users to be intellectually stimulating
and rewarding. Seeing folks with expertise in a particular area step up and contribute their time and ideas to help improve the product is quite exciting. Every time I hear about a new interesting organization starting to use CiviCRM, I get a renewed sense of excitement about our work. The range of civic sector organizations currently using the software is quite amazing to me - from large international advocacy organizations to local performing arts troupes. I also really enjoy interacting with our international community - building friendships and getting to share culture (food, music, humor ....) with colleagues on every continent.
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Arthur Richards

DEVELOPER

WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION

http://wikimediafoundation.org

At the Wikimedia Foundation, we leverage CiviCRM to maintain millions of records of donors and their contributions. Working with the product and particularly with the community has been a terrific experience. There's nothing quite like two open source organizations working together to meet their respective goals while ultimately strengthening the open source community as a whole.
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Lisa Jervis

End-user, Administrator, Implementor

Center for Media Justice

http://www.centerformediajustice.org

Civi has been an amazing tool for CMJ (and for other organizations I work with) to keep our most important data all in one place in a user friendly way.

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Home » Blogs » lobo's blog

Whats new in CiviCRM v3.4 / v4.0?

Submitted by lobo on February 25, 2011 - 11:02

Overview and New Features in CiviCRM v3.4 / v4.0 With the release of 3.4.alpha1, a brief tour of some of the new features and changes in v3.4 / v4.0 is in order. This release had 7 successful Make It Happen Projects. We also had a record number of patches (100+) that were incorporated into this release.

  • v3.4 and v4.0 have the same set of CMS independent features. v3.4 supports Drupal 6.x and Joomla 1.5.x only. v4.0 supports Drupal 7 and Joomla 1.6.x. v3.4 is expected to be the last release to support D6/J1.5.
  • API v3 - The new version 3 API contains the standardisation that many of us have been hanging out for. The names of the function files and the functions have been standardised as have the inputs and outputs. There is a new wrapper function: civicrm_api( entity,action,$params ); to make it easier to call. If you have any doubt on how to use it we have developed an API explorer and code generator that is shipped with civicrm and will let you use interactive
  • Thanks to the folks at Progressive Technology Project, we have integrated CiviCampaign with other CiviCRM components, specifically: CiviContribute, CiviMember, CiviEvent, CiviMail and CiviEngage. We've also integrated the PhoneList and WalkList CiviEngage Reports with CiviCampaign, making CiviCampaign more useful for grassroots organizing and political campaigns. We plan on extending and improving CiviCampaign in v4.1 via another Make It Happen
  • We've made significant strides with our logging framework and reporting. v3.4 has comprehensive logging reports with a "revert" feature for contact and contribution data.
  • Joomla v1.6 introduced an ACL based permissioning system. With the help of Brian Shaughnessy, Elin Waring and a successful Make It Happen Campaign, we've integrated Joomla! ACL Permissioning and CiviCRM. This gets CiviJoomla to much closer parity with CiviDrupal. The front end Joomla! layer is updated to Joomla! 1.6 style, including using JForm for menu parameters and 1.6 language strings.
  • We introduced workflow capabilities with CiviMail in later versions of 3.3. We've optimized the CiviMail queries to use the smart group cache and store the "intended recipients" in a new database table. This allows CiviReport to be more accurate when a mailing was delivered. Storing the intended recipients in a new table avoids expensive queries and also solves the ACL permissioning w/CiviMail bugs from prior releases. CiviMail now also supports hierarchical groups
  • We continue to work on improving and optimizing dedupe. v3.4 introduces Prev/Next navigation during dedupe merges. Dedupe results are now cached in a database table, thus allowing users to merge and continue to the next pair of "potential merges". We've laid the framework to introduce prev/next navigation with other CiviCRM searches. Dedupe results are now displayed via a pagination system.
  • With major sponsorship from Corvair Society of America (CORSA), and in collaboration with JMA Consulting, CiviMember now allows membership upsell. This allows membership type to be changed on renewal while maintaining membership record continuity for the contact.
  • Offline and existing contributions can now be credited to a Personal Campaign Page. This is another successful Make It Happen project.
  • v3.4 introduces the second phase of CiviCRM Extensions. You can now browse and download CiviCRM extensions from within your CiviCRM install.
  • Thanx to a great patch from AGH Strategies, CiviCRM now supports US counties. A US counties SQL file is now shipped in the distribution (this will be part of 3.4.alpha2)
  • Thanx to the boredom of an incredibly long plane ride, CiviCRM Advanced Search now supports viewing details on "related contacts". For e.g., you can specify: Show me the details of all the parents of the kids in the second grade.
  • Our first alpha release had 99% of tests passing. We plan on increasing the number of tests by 10% before the final release. Automated testing is an important aspect of ensuring the quality of CiviCRM releases.

Comments

Submitted by petednz on February 25, 2011 - 12:12

great work - look forward to exploring both versions. para 7 has word 'deduce' - best to change to dedupe, since deduce also makes sense - sort of

Submitted by xcf33 on February 25, 2011 - 13:17

What's the backward compitability with API version 2.0?

Also it was confusing some location API required your to put in the param version => '3.0',

I have a lot of customized code that uses API V2, if they are not backward compitable I would be in some hot water shortly. :\

Submitted by lobo on February 25, 2011 - 17:21

v2.0 has been left as is, so existing code should work as is. Would be good if you can test before we hit final in case there are some unforeseen issues.

Submitted by xcf33 on February 28, 2011 - 08:01

xavier, lobo:

 

Thanks guys,

 

I realize that the day was probably going to come. I'm very happy that you guys decided to spearhead and tackle some of the API issues. I'm actually very excited to employ some API V3 and since it looks more standaridzed and eaiser to understand. I think for the long term view this is a great step since even if Civi Core refactors the entity action model can still be carried over.

 

I'll be more than happy to update my code to test the new API versions and offer any thing I find :)

 

Good work guys

Submitted by Eileen on February 28, 2011 - 11:50

My recommendation is to wait for the next Alpha release before doing any testing as we are working through the function rename now.

 

Personally as soon as the renamed apiv3 is back in trunk I'm going to try backporting it to existing sites & see how it plays (it should be fairly easy to backport after the rename)

Submitted by xavier on March 2, 2011 - 07:29

Hi,

 

The next alpha is coming out anyday (api branch has been merged back in the trunk).

 

I'd suggest to install from the svn from the trunk branch, likely that the code is updated at a steady pace during the alpha/beta period)

 

X+

Submitted by xavier on February 28, 2011 - 05:17

Hi,

 

You did test on the trunk, right ? version shouldn't be mandatory if I remember right. After a long soul searching, Eileen has started and changed API v3 so it's 100% compatible with v2 and if some people steps up, might be maintained longer than for the next version.

This being said, we would very very much appreciate if you can join us in the forum and try migrating a some of your code, see if it's as smooth as we hope.

Submitted by andrew on February 28, 2011 - 16:36

Thanks for all the hard work of the core team and contributions from the awesome CiviCRM community!

Can't wait to give the next alpha a try.

 

Submitted by Guest (not verified) on March 5, 2011 - 10:06

Hi, is there any projected release date for 4.0? I'm kind of stuck right now - I want to build a new install, but:

--Drupal 6 is on the way out
--CiviCRM has announced they won't be supporting or backporting anything to version 3.3 or before
--And yet, CiviCRM 3.4/4.0 isn't even close to ready

In effect, there's no good supported version. You've stomped over the old versions and told people to stop using them, but there's no new version. I tried Drupal 7 and CiviCRM 4.0 alpha, but there are install problems (no CiviCRM menu item created, other things a little wonky)... Basically I can install something old and deprecated, setting myself up for an immediate, difficult, mandatory upgrade path, or I can install something new and broken, setting myself up for a host of random problems. Neither of these choices is appealing.

By the way, the sandbox doesn't work:

http://d7.sandbox.civicrm.org/

demo/demo doesn't work for a username/password.

Submitted by lobo on March 5, 2011 - 10:26

1. I suspect 3.4 / 4.0 will be out in 4-6 weeks

2. 3.3 is still supported and critical bugs are being fixed. New features are introduced in 3.4 / 4.0

3. In general we do not backport new features to older versions.

 

Would help if you can be a lot more specific with what the bugs present in 3.4/4.0 on the forums here: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/board,61.0.html regards lobo

Submitted by micheas on March 6, 2011 - 14:00

A) 3.4 will run on Drupal 6 so while there is no backports planned for 3.3.x the 3.3.x to 3.4 upgrade should be fairly painless.

B) While it is not recommended to use 4.0.alpha1 for a live site, nobody is stopping you from doing so.

If you go with B, I would recomend actively reporting your bugs in a reproducable maner. 

 

 

Submitted by Curtis (not verified) on March 9, 2011 - 08:43

You state:
"In collaboration with JMA Consulting, CiviMember now allows membership upsell. This allows membership type to be changed on renewal while maintaining membership record continuity for the contact."

However, we, Corvair Society of America (CORSA), were the ones that provided the majority of funding for this project. Yet we are not listed anywhere on your site. In addition, after we were told the project had been fully funded, the campaign continued...

Submitted by Dave Greenberg on March 11, 2011 - 16:32

Apologies for the oversight. We did not originally have information about the ultimate source of the sponsorship. I have updated the blog post and we will have more formal recognition post when the release goes stable which will definitely include the Corvair Society of America (CORSA).

 

Development costs for the project were actually not fully funded. JMA Consulting contributed the remaining hours.