If you’re running a site using Joomla you’re no doubt aware that some things which appear to be straight forward with a Drupal base aren’t so easy. Both Joomla and Drupal have their strengths and weaknesses, I just happen to be a long way down the Joomla path.

A big issue for me was how do I restrict access to my site depending on memberships to a real world (non internet) organisation. All my members have an entry in the CiviCRM database but many will not have a CMS login. Out of the box there was no real way of achieving this without getting into LDAP territory.

We've had the ability to add one/more CiviCRM Profiles to the drupal registration page since the first release (thanx to the flexibility of Drupal hooks). This was not possible in Joomla 1.0.x and we hoped the 1.5.x series might help solve this issue and be more open. While Joomla 1.5 is a major step forward in multiple aspects, it did not address this issue. So to some extent we were stuck. I was hoping for someone in the community to step up and do the needful. But that did not seem to be happening either :(

After yet another forum post on this topic, i decided to take a look at the code and figure out what needs to be done. We had abstracted most of the pieces from drupal already, so we just need to make a few function calls at the right places. I started looking for an example component that does something similar, that I could base my work on. Had heard good things about Community Builder, so that was my first choice. The CB 1.1 release does not support Joomla 1.5 and you need to become a "paid subscriber" to get the 1.2 RC. I'm not really a big fan of the pay money to get the latest version of the software, so I moved on from CB and started looking at other possibilities. Found a couple of others, but realized that all these components are commercial and require registration / payment to download it etc. Definitely a very different ecosystem than drupal.

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.

Thanks to the wonderful people from Joomla! who took us under their Google Summer of Code umbrella and personal commitment from Wes Morgan, of Environment America (who will be mentoring on CiviCRM’s behalf), we’re very, very happy to announce that we have two student projects funded by Google this year!

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