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.

This week we're releasing CiviCRM 3.1.6 and 3.2.beta5 - they are both regular bugfix releases, however, they also bring a fix to recently discovered security vulnerability, which in specific conditions allows an unauthorized person to access some CiviCRM functionality. Please make sure you upgrade your production installations running 3.1.5 and earlier to 3.1.6 to avoid the risk.

For 3.1.6 upgrade instructions check: Drupal Upgrade, Joomla! Upgrade and Standalone Upgrade instructions. Make sure not to confuse 3.1 (which is stable version) with 3.2 (which is still beta) when downloading the upgrade bundle - even though it's already quite solid, you don't want to end up with beta release on your production site. :-)

UPDATE: Dec 17, 2010

dharmatech has contributed a similar module to drupal.

d.o. page: http://drupal.org/project/civievent_discount

civi blog: http://civicrm.org/blogs/dharmatech/add-coupons-events-module

great job dharmatech!

UPDATE: Dec 2, 2010

As of now (version 3.1.5), CiviCRM limits finding and merging of duplicate records to users with the "Administer CiviCRM" permission. A recent thread on the forums points out that some organizations will want to allow that privilege to non-administrative users. Having a need for this myself, I'm looking for the best way to do it. If a reasonable solution can be found, I'm hoping the changes will make it into core at some point in the future.

We are excited to announce that CiviCRM 3.1.5 has been released, and is now available for download. You can also try it out on our demo site. This release includes 40 bug fixes/improvements to existing functionality. We recommend that sites currently running v3.1.4 or earlier upgrade to this version as soon as possible.

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Originally posted at TwoMiceAndAStrawberry.com.

I recently had to modify CiviCRM to support a specific use case for a client. In this project I needed to allow the user to enter anything in the Individual Prefix field, rather than choosing from a list of options. The client in this case was very sensitive about presenting the individual's honorific precisely as the individual wants, so that "Dr.," "Rev. Dr.," and "Most Rt. Rev. Dr." should all be possible, along with anything else the user might want to enter.

We are excited to announce that CiviCRM 3.1.4 has been released, and is now available for download. You can also try it out on our demo site. This release includes ~100 bug fixes/improvements to existing functionality. We recommend that sites currently running v3.1.3 or earlier upgrade to this version as soon as possible.

Notice for Sites Using Moneris Payment Processor

We were unable to obtain an appropriate GPL license for the Moneris plugin code, and therefore that file has been removed from our downloads. If your site uses Moneris for payment processing, you will need follow these directions to download the required code after upgrading your site to 3.1.4.

Every year in June, around the 10th day, a commemorative event happens in Akron, Ohio - the annual celebration of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. Hosted at the University of Akron, over 10,000 participants from around the world gather to celebrate the founding of this wonderful fellowship. In recent years, registration for this all weekend event has moved from mail-in forms to an online registration process. Online registration challenges from the past few years had made us seek a solution to that could handle a surge of registrations in the first 24 hours, and collect all the necessary information required by the University.

In past years, Zen Cart could handle our registrations - it may have even been able to handle it this year, except we needed to collect more infomation than in years' past, and we wanted to still be able to allow multiple registrations per transaction. One serious issue from last year was the server became overloaded as thousands of registants came to the site to register at midnight. We had 42 days to pick a solution, and implement.

To make custom tabs when viewing a contact, begin by using the tabs_hook "hook_civicrm_tabs".

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/CiviCRM+hook+specification#CiviCRMhookspecification-hookcivicrmtabs

A simple example given on the hooks documentation link above

function civitest_civicrm_tabs( &$tabs, $contactID ) {

// unset the contribition tab, i.e. remove it from the page
unset( $tabs[1] );

// let's add a new "contribution" tab with a different name and put it last

We are excited to announce that CiviCRM 3.1.3 has been released, and is now available for download. You can also try it out on our demo site. This release includes jQuery performance improvements for drupal and 50+ bug fixes/improvements to existing functionality.