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

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.


 

CiviCon London is only 1 week away which means it's time to draft a "State of the Project" presentation for the opening session. It's a good time to look up from our computer screens so we can think about and discuss goals for the next few years.

Our number one goal is to build a strong vibrant community which can sustain the project for a long time to come. We think this means folks from across the community participating in ALL aspects of the project, and the project becoming self-sustaining from a financial point of view. We are super-excited to see folks in the community taking on important tasks in lots of areas …

• Organizing CiviCon and UK Code / Book sprints
• API v3 team
• Accounting system integration
• Case studies / website redesign

Want to control the Joomla ACL depending on a user’s membership status?

Version 2 of the Joomla CiviCRM Membership Authentication Plugin does precisely this for Joomla 1.6 and CiviCRM 4.0 users. 

• Allows users to login with either their username or email address

• Uses the Joomla user table to authenticate

• Checks that that user has a current CiviCRM membership record

• Sets the Joomla Access Level depending on the users membership status

In the past three weeks, we worked with a client to build scheduled email reminders for activities in CiviCRM. Detailed project specifications are on the wiki at ARMS Project Home. We've added the following new features to CiviCRM as part of this work:

• We've extended Profile View/Edit to handle a combination of Contact + Activity + Custom Fields. Thus we can send a mailing with a link to a profile edit form and collect activity related details from the end user.
• Coleman W integrated a similar set of changes for CiviCRM WebForm v2. He also incorporated a bunch of other changes in the v2 version including the ability to create multiple contacts and create an associated activity. The new v2 UI is quite spiffy
• You can schedule a reminder email to be sent to a group of activities that meet a certain criteria. You can see the UI for this on our demo server (you will need to be logged in). The workflow allows you to send repeated reminders on a specified schedule. Emails can be based on message templates. A visual specification of this can be found on the wiki

I have been leveraging the CiviCase component of CiviCRM to help a crisis response organization transition to a paperless process.  I was originally tasked with "fixing" a Microsoft implementation of a custom web application written in VBScript and MS SQL Server but after fighting with the former developers horrible code I finally decided to migrate the system over to an open source LAMP implementation leveraging J! 1.5 and CiviCRM 3.1.

A great thing in CiviCRM v3.4 and v4.0 is that for Joomla! users there is a new helper file that makes it very easy to access the CiviCRM API. That combined with version 3 of the API makes it easier than ever to put CiviCRM data anywhere in your site. I'm going to show you how I made a module that shows the groups a logged in user is a member of. Because it uses the API this can display on any page whether or not it is a CiviCRM page.

One of the best things about CiviCRM 3.4 and 4 for Joomla! users is that hooks are now implemented using the Joomla! plugin system. This actually has always worked, but it was not documented and now it's implemented a lot more cleanly.

After spending a lot of time, CiviSync CMS Component (for Joomla) and Module (for Drupal) were able to see the sunlight. We have now released the two extensions on our website www.targetintegration.com

CiviSync CMS was primarily created as an additional item to CiviSync Outlook Addon (Still Under Development); to provide an easy to use interface to manage site key of a CiviCRM installation and API Key for the users in the database. Thanks to Xavier who helped me realise the full potential of CiviSync CMS; that not only CiviSync but whereever you want to use API, CiviSync CMS can be a useful tool.

Eli Beckerman is the second winner of a copy of Using CiviCRM from Packt Publishing. Eli is excited about the potential of CiviCRM to organize bottom-up transformations to deal collaboratively with the many crises facing the world today.

Packt has also selected a runner-up in its contest: an experienced CiviCRM user from the City Bible Forum, ken, will get a downloadable eBook copy of the book.

Here's some background on Using CiviCRM from Packt's site:

What you will learn from this book: