Notice to non-developers: This post is about how some functionality in 4.2 will be implemented in code and in the database, with very minor changes to anything visible through a browser. If you're not a developer, it probably won't interest you.

Background
Pogstone's client had already been using a web-based membership database, however that system did not have any features related to households and other features needed when interacting with families and children. They also needed many features related to needs of a typical synagogue that were missing from the previous system.

Roll-out process

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.

A couple of issues have begun to sting us repeatedly and I see others raising same issue.

#1

Getting a Default Header/Footer used in the SysTplMsgs

SysTplMsgs (System Template Messages) are found here /civicrm/admin/messageTemplates?reset=1)

To avoid repeated copying of the desired header/footer in to the upto 22 SysTplMsg, one option would be to add a checkbox to the CiviMail Footer/Headers (/civicrm/admin/component?reset=1)

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

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:

Sheila Burkett is the first winner of a copy of Using CiviCRM from Packt Publishing. Packt is running a promotional contest where you just have to post into the forum or email them to qualify to win a copy of the book.

Here's some more information about the book from the Press Release:

Using CiviCRM is the first commercially published book on CiviCRM, and came out in February 2011. It will teach readers to build a CRM that conforms to their needs and to integrate it with Drupal or Joomla!. Written by Brian Shaughnessy and Joseph Murray, this book will assist readers in developing an integrated online system that handles contacts, donations, event registration, bulk e-mailing, case management, and other functions such as activity tracking, grants, reporting and analytics.

As 3.3. goes live it’s great to see a couple of Make-it-Happen initiatives included in it. The Make-it-Happen initiative was born out of my frustration at the difficulties of getting things into CiviCRM that were useful for everyone but not funded by any ONE organisation.

Since launching it we've managed to get a couple of long-wanted de-dupe improvements in - now in 3.3 you can make CiviCRM REMEMBER that John Smith from Widgimootha and John Smith from Aalberg are different people. For those of us who have been round the loop of running a de-dupe search, choosing two contacts to merge, merging them, and suddenly discovering than you can't navigate back to the duplicate listing page there's still quite a bit of scope for improvement so consider making a contribution to the 'prev-next' initiative

Being able to efficiently identify and merge duplicate contacts and related data is be an important -- and often time-consuming -- task for organizations getting data from multiple sources. The current CiviCRM dedupe and merge process does not scale well beyond a moderate number of contacts and consequently there has been dicussion on the forums and IRC about optimizing the dedupe and merge code in CiviCRM.