CivicActions is offering a full day CiviCRM User Training in Seattle and in Berkeley.
I'll be conducting the training which is aimed at non-profit staff and consultants who want to learn how to
configure, administer and use CiviCRM.The training program is
equally applicable to people who are already using CiviCRM and want to
become "power users", as well as people who are interested in evaluating
CiviCRM for their organization or clients.The agenda will be finalized based on participant mix. Topics may include:

After what seems to be an incredibly long time, we released CiviCRM v3.2 a few weeks ago to good reviews and not too many critical bug reports :). Now that is out of the way, we are starting to plan the feature set for v3.3

We've been fortunate to get a grant from Open Society Institute to help add some features important for Human Right Organizations, specifically for Front Line. We've been working with Front Line for a few years and this grant allows us to target their needs more effectively. Some of the features that are included in this grant are:

• Extending Address inheritance from Organization to an Individual (or from any contact to any other contact - TBD).
• Building Advanced Reports and Dashlets for Human Rights Organizations
• First version of Logging

When working in setting up and developing websites (among other things) we often have to choose between getting stuck in and getting stuff done the known way or trying to invest time in coming up with a more automated way or efficient way of doing things. Usually at some point we become aware of whether we made the right choice – and I find that moment is normally accompanied by a certain sinking feeling.

A school needed an online admission application process to be developed and integrated with CiviSchool. The application form is a different workflow from the online family forms. Web Access helped convert this idea to working application as part of the CiviSchool Project. I have been working with Web Access on this project and we have completed most of it. Now seemed to be a good time to let everyone know about what we have done so far. Here is how the admission workflow is -

• Parent account setup :
  A parent goes to the school site and uses a civicrm registration profile to create an account and enters the site. The account automatically gets assigned a "Applicant Parent" subtype.
• Filling admission application forms :
  From the dashboard parent fills admission application forms for an applicant (child). Parent can apply for 1 or more applicants. All applicants are assigned a "Applicant" subtype.
• Submitting a payment :
  Depending on whether financial aid is taken or not, parent submits a payment for an applicant. The payment is done via contribution page with contribution type - "Application Fee". Since parent is the one making the payment, to keep track of which applicant the payment is being done for, an extra argument is passed to the payment/contribution url. We using a hook to make all the checks and link the payment to the applicant.
• Scheduling appointments :
  Once the application is complete and payment is made (if needed), parent can schedule a child visit or a parent interview. A school tour could be booked at any stage of the process.

I have been working on integrating discount system in civicrm for a project. I came across a good blog http://civicrm.org/node/566 and implemented it as it is. Then i customized it for role based discounts and many other discounts possibilities. But now i have a requirement to provide a front end to manage coupons as:

1. Add/Delete Coupons
2. Set beginning/expiry date & time for coupon codes
3. Set how many times each coupon code can be used
4. Track coupon code usage on who, when, why and for what purpose it was used.
5. Create sets of random coupon codes with customizable patterns

We are excited to announce that the first BETA release of version 3.2 is now available for download. You can also try it out on our sandbox site. Please remember this is a BETA release and it should NOT be used on production sites.

This release includes several major new features/highlights:

• Usability improvements - Better looking and more intuitive Contact Summary Page. The new "Actions" button provides 1-click access to most contact-related forms. New clean and consistent icons have been implemented to provide helpful visual cues. You can now get a configurable contact summary pop-up from search results by mousing over the contact icon on any row. We'll be blogging with more details on these usability features during the release cycle.
• Support for PHP 5.3 -This release supports PHP 5.3.
• CiviCase Phase 3 - Thanks to the Physicians Health Program folks for pushing CiviCase to the next level! You can check out the phase 3 enhancements here.
• CiviEvent workflow improvements - Streamlining the workflow for events, providing 1-click access to event related screens from the configuration panel, and generating event name badges. For more details check CRM-6230 and CRM-6294.
• Free-tagging, and Tags for Cases and Activities - You can add one or more free-tagging "taxonomies" - called Tagsets - for use with contacts, cases and / or activities. You can also specify which tags can be used for which types of records.

We've been hard at work implementing an online set of forms to collect family information for the school module. This is one of our final projects for the year and eliminates the tedious summer ritual for the admin staff of sending paper forms to the 200 school families and for the parent to fill out the same information every year. This also saves the admin staff from entering that same information into the SIS

We've built this work on the parent portal that we launched late last year. Parents can update information on themselves and their children anytime via their drupal account. The form is composed of 5 sub-forms:

• Household Information: Name, Email, Phone and Address of the household. We currently support 2 household and 4 contacts. These are stored as CiviCRM contacts with a relationship link of type Parent / Child to the student. We created a custom group to store which household a parent belonged to. We did not use CiviCRM's household functionality.
  

So, amongst all the discussion of import methods lately I just wanted to flag another possible approach - creating a CiviCRM hook module for the Drupal migrate module

There are a bunch of great blogs out there on how to use the table wizard module with the migrate module to import data from various mysql tables or views into Drupal nodes / users / taxonomies / content types - for example:

http://www.lullabot.com/articles/drupal-data-imports-migrate-and-table-wizard

The migrate module has a bunch of hooks to allow you to use it for other forms of migrations. I rattled up the module / code pasted at the end of this blog in a couple of hours as a proof of content for using this approach to CiviCRM imports. The code I threw together just offers up civicrm_contact table fields but I think there must be some clever ways to use existing import tools rather than this rudimentary approach.

The past few weeks have been just an amazing ride through the CiviCRM universe. We've had some excellent training sessions, an awesome CiviCon and then the sprints which produced a nice new book and some major improvements to our translation process. We've also been spending a lot of time thinking about what we want to accomplish with CiviCRM 4.0. So here are some of our thoughts, note that many of them are speculative and if something is really important to you or your org, consider making that part of YOUR OWN personal battleplan and contribute a design and code to make it happen.

My top 4 guidelines with regard to 4.0 are:

• No new features. 4.0 is a restructuring and refactoring of part of the code base. Our objective is to make the code base more solid and not focus on adding functionality to the application.
• Improved extensibility. We've heard the message loud and clear. We need to continue making it easier for developers to extend and customize CiviCRM. More documentation, More examples, More API's
• Improved testability. We need to continue increasing the test coverage of the code base. We are continuing with a strong push on this with 3.2 and have introduced Selenium into the mix. We hope to get the community involved in improving our test coverage in a big way
• Switch to a modern framework. The current CiviCRM code base is based on PEAR which is old and no longer maintained. We will upgrade the core libraries to a more modern object oriented framework, with a strong userbase / documentation / testability. To ease the transition we will stay with our current templating system but we will upgrade Smarty to v3.0.

Over the first three days of the code sprint, we got through most of the tasks to be done. So, on the last day it was decided that some time could be allocated to something different, taking advantage of developpers from different continents being together. Three of us spent a few hours working on coding a way to deploy CiviCRM site with Aegir.

Aegir is an installation profile and a group of modules (mostly hosting and provision, along with drush) that make it possible to provision (install, update, clone, backup, etc.) new Drupal sites with the click of a button. Leveraging this system for CiviCRM will have great benefits: making installation quick and easy for non-technical users, keeping the Drupal and CiviCRM installations up to date more easily, which improves security. Being able to quickly install a new site (or clone an existing one) also helps developpers, who can more easily test bug fixes or do a "dry-run" before upgrading a site.

In my day job at Koumbit, we maintain an increasing number of sites using Aegir, a bunch of them using CiviCRM. I had already started working on an extension to provision that would be able to deploy CiviCRM, when it was brought to my attention that Deepak had just published a Drush script for CiviCRMdrush extension for CiviCRM. The code sprint was an occasion to collaborate with both Deepak and Wes Morgan while having Antoine Beaupré (a fellow Koumbiteer and a member of Aegir's development team) on irc. All of us worked on refactoring the CiviCRM install code and a new drush extension, taking advantage of provision's features. We worked on it the whole afternoon, and thus were able to demo Aegir installing a CiviCRM site at the after dinner show-and-tell!