The Drupal Views module has some pretty cool functionality. Views 2 fixed the "everything is a node" concept from Views 1, this enables integration with CiviCRM (which does nothing with nodes). A concise description of Views from its project page: This tool is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results.

CiviCRM profiles (in view/search mode) behaves like views. However it is not a flexible or configurable as views is for the end user. Integrating with views also allows the potential of integrating CiviCRM information with other Drupal specific information. e.g. Contact information on folks who are most active on your blog / forum / comments

I took user.views.inc as a model and started hacking away to create civicrm.views.inc. You can get a copy of that file from our svn respository. So far its quite simple and just integrates the civicrm_contact and civicrm_email tables. I hope to add the phone/address fields in the next couple of hours/days and get a better idea of how to potentially generalize it.

Based on the success of the previous trainings/boot camps, we’d like to schedule our first training on the US East Coast: July 23rd-24th in Philadelphia. We’d like to host people from three / four different organizations (around twelve participants) and conduct the sessions as a mix of advanced user training, developer training, design and coding, based on the interests of the attendees. We've built quite a few features and improved integration with Drupal / Joomla in prior trainings.

The training would be held at the Ethical Humanist Society of Philadelphia, 1906 South Rittenhouse Square (with lots of nice eating places nearby).

This would be a paid event – $1,000/person for the two days (none of us being from the East Coast, we need to cover our expenses). Please let us know (by mailing dave at civicrm dot org) if you are interested; we’d like to make the training definite in the coming week or two. We currently have a total of 4 paying folks signed up, so we need a couple more orgs to sign up if the training is to happen.

Drupal 6 introduced a new menu system. CiviCRM had modeled its menu system after drupal 4.x which meant we needed to upgrade the menu code significantly to upgrade CiviCRM to Drupal 6. We took the opportunity to learn and understand more from drupal's new system and also simplify the interface between CiviCRM and Drupal with regard to the menu hook.

The CiviCRM menu system has been based on the Drupal menu system, so all credit for the below goes to chx and the Drupal folks (all blame should be assigned to us). We have simplified and extended it a bit to meet our needs. Similar to Drupal menu system, the CiviCRM menu data now resides in the database. civicrm_menu stores all the information for a menu item.

It feels like 2008 is the year of CiviCRM training. Following in the heels of our Melbourne bootcamp is the CiviCRM webinar bought to you by Michelle Murrain and the good folks from NTEN. You can read more details about it on the NTEN website: Learn More About CiviCRM: Can This Be Your Organization's CRM?.

If you are new to CiviCRM or have just gotten started with CiviCRM, this webinar is for you. Goto the NTEN website and sign up now :). NTEN has graciously offered CiviCRM users the webinar at the NTEN member rate. All you need to do is select CiviCRM User in the Where Did You Hear Field and you will receive the $25 member fee.

Here's our first draft at an agenda for the webinar:

Earlier today we pushed out v2.0.2 of CiviCRM. You can download it here. We have fixed approx 67 issues between 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 (this involved approx 170 commits). This brings us to a grand total of 504 issues resolved for the 2.0 series. We suspect (and hope) that the rate of bugs filed / issues fixed will slow down significantly for future 2.0.x releases. There have been some significant changes and improvements to the upgrade procedure, specifically with regard to activity history. More details on this can be found in this wiki page. We've also added code to give better messages in a few common error cases. More details on the blog post here.

You can follow these instructions for Drupal or Joomla

Here are some interesting / random stats with regard to the 2.0 release:

• We've been averaging 200+ downloads on a weekday. We crossed 300 downloads the day 2.0.1 was released. There have been 2800+ downloads on CiviCRM since 2.0 was released (12th march)
• 530 unique sites have pinged back with either 2.0 or 2.0.1 code (365 Drupal, 165 Joomla). We average approx 20+ new pingbacks on a weekday. This matches well with our random estimate of 10% of folks who download it, actually install it :)
• We are averaging 8K pageviews on a weekday (according to google analytics). There has been a nice bump in this since the 2.0 release.
• Forum traffic has been growing quite nicely. You can check the stats here

We think that 2.0 has been a pretty good relase are quite happy with the quality of it. We plan on fixing only critical bugs in future 2.0.x releases and move most of our focus / resources to the 2.1 release