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
 

Background
Pogstone's client had already been using a web-based membership database, however that system did not have any features related to households and other features needed when interacting with families and children. They also needed many features related to needs of a typical synagogue that were missing from the previous system.

Roll-out process

Since CRM stands for Constituent Relationship Management, one would expect to have robust capabilies for dealing with relationships. This expectation is met when using the staff areas of CiviCRM.

However, in any of the self-service areas such as event registration profiles, membership profiles, and stand-alone profiles then relationships are missing.  Each profile can only be used to collect information about a single contact.

This lack of support for relationships causes headaches in the following situations:

There have been a number of blog posts discussing the needs for improved accounting features in CiviCRM. The results and current specification is at the wiki at: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Finance+and+Accounting

Its time to help to make-it-happen for CiviAccounts once the specifications on the wiki are streamlined and prioritized.   Dave has requested that all interested parties join this new CiviAccounts team.

With the rise of importance of social networks, and the sheer number of them, there has been development of a number of "listening" tools, which aggregate people's activities/fans/followers/friends and try to produce useful information about what is going on.

I have created 2 custom searches at that I find useful for finding upcoming birthdays and wedding anniversaries. Hopefully these are useful for other folks too.

The new searches can be downloaded from:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/x/WgDvAQ

I have shared the slides ( and video ) from my ignite session at CiviCon, which describes a case study of my use of CiviCRM for a synagogue, including invoicing and non-Western calendars. Everything is at my blog.

-Sarah

Everyone is continuing to produce an incredible amount of content for the book, plus rework and update areas that were showing some age. The new set of chapters for developers and people who want to extend CiviCRM is really fantastic. Everyone who has been wanting to extend CiviCRM, but didn't know where to start should be able to dive in. Everyone is increasing their knowledge of CiviCRM, getting ideas for new features and improving existing features.

This is a follow up to my earlier blog entry at http://civicrm.org/node/651 The topic of how to properly greet and send mail to couples, such as "Jane and John Doe" has been discussed many times, such as at the blog post: http://civicrm.org/node/558. But the problem with the approach described there ( and included in CiviCRM 3.0 ) Is it requires information about someone's spouse in their contact record and marking half on the contacts "Do not mail" even though there are times when I DO want to communicate with just one spouse or the other for different events. So I wrote some code that implements some new tokens called "joint_greeting_casual", "joint_greeting_formal", "joint_greeting_formal_firstname". The code can be downloaded from civicrm_extras.zip. After downloading and unzipping the file, follow the directions for using hooks with Joomla or Drupal at the CiviCRM wiki.

The topic of how to properly greet and send mail to couples, such as "Jane and John Doe" has been discussed many times, such as at the blog post: http://civicrm.org/node/558. But the problem with the approach in the blog ( and included in CiviCRM 3.0 ) Is it requires information about someone's spouse in their contact record and marking half on the contacts "Do not mail" even though there are times when I DO want to communicate with just one spouse or the other for different events.