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

A couple of weeks back I wrote here some thoughts about letting users manage and modify their own private collection of reports without actually having site-wide "administer reports" privileges. I've since gone ahead and written up the code to make this happen, and I would love to get feedback from the community on its usefulness and ways to improve it.

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.


 

A client of mine at NS Web Solutions is looking to solve a problem involving the way their users need to handle reports.  I think this might be common enough to be relevant for others, so here's a bit about what we're planning to do.

Note: This is based on a short forum thread here: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,22307.msg93500.html

I've just released a new version of the CiviCRM Webform Integration module for Drupal 6 and 7.
This module provides a flexible and powerful way to create forms linked to the CiviCRM database. Version 2 of the module is built for CiviCRM 3.4/4.0, and can create and update contacts, group subscriptions, tags, relationships, cases, activities, event participants, and custom data.
New in 2.3:

We've been offering CiviCRM consulting and hosting on a per-client basis for some time now, and as we have grown, we have started to feel the need for greater automation and consistency in our hosting offerings and contracts. Koumbit is currently in the midst of developing a comprehensive hosted CiviCRM offering, with the support of a few courageous clients.

Recently we spent some time cleaning up the code base for Drupal's Views module in CiviCRM. This will be reflected in the 4.1 release of CiviCRM, at this point this was all written for Drupal 7, though should be portable to Drupal 6. There were a couple new features thrown in but much of this will focus on making the code base a little more efficient and easier to read.

The two major tasks were:

I recently completed a conversion of about 8 years of history from a 5 year old Blackbaud Kintera site to a Drupal CiviCRM solution. Confused yet? Don't worry, all we be revealed in time. As a way of giving back, I am planning to share my experiences good and bad, what worked, what did not, what I learned and what I will and won't do next time.

I've just released the stable 2.0 version of the Drupal Webform CiviCRM Integration module and wanted to share some of the cool new things you can do with it.

Version 1, which I wrote earlier this year, was basically built for a single purpose: you could have a user fill out a webform, and their contact record (name, address, email, etc.) would be created/updated and an activity of the form submission would be logged. That alone is pretty darn useful, but suggestions from users, the advent of API v3, and a commission from the core team got me setting sights higher for the next release.

As a freelancer, here are a few notes and an overview on how I solved a client's contacts consolidation when the data came from external sources:

My Use Case
- Client had ongoing events and conferences over several years which meant there were databases and mailing lists all over the place (many of which had crossover).
- I set up ongoing JSON exports of the contact data from the external sites, which could be queried by date range to get the latest changes.