Blogs

I've spent a fair amount of the weekend attempting to install FishEye from Cenqua. Its awesome that companies like Atlassian (wiki and issue tracking software) and Cenqua (coincidentally both these firms are Australian!) give away free licenses to open source projects like CiviCRM.

FishEye helps you analyze, search, share and monitor your source code repository (in our case svn). We've always wanted something a bit more fancy than what subversion offers out of the box (a vanilla http interface to the code). We also wanted better integration with JIRA and link issues to the appropriate revision of the code. FishEye promised to deliver on both these cases. We had also heard pretty good reviews of the product.

An interesting discussion spawned on the civicrm-dev list recently regarding our implementation of custom groups and fields. We have been super cautious about this and have advised people not to create more than 20 custom fields per object (contact, activity, group, relationship etc).

With lots of excitement and anticipation on the mailing list regarding upcoming 1.7 features - the team has been pushing hard to keep on schedule for alpha release by the end of this month. As of this morning, we're down to 19 open issues out of a total of 80 posted for the release! We're shooting to get this down below 15 by weeks end.

There has definitely been some "scope creep" for 1.7 beyond the committed issues on the road-map. The good news is that these additions have been the result of community feedback and are responses to the real-world use cases that folks are bringing to the team. We're doing our best to balance responsiveness to these requests with the need to get releases out on a regular and timely basis.

Several CiviCRM folks will be attending two upcoming conferences in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both conferences should provide great opportunities to learn, share and network with other folks in the non-profit and open source software communities.

Aspiration will be hosting the 2007 Nonprofit Software Development Summit in Oakland next week (February 21-23). I am looking forward to lively conversations there regarding best practices and trends in FLOSS non-profit software development. Michal Mach from our Polish contingent is hoping to join us there and lead a session on Localisation approaches and challenges. We can also carve out time for an informal CiviCRM "users" gathering if there's interest.

Seems like for the 2008 elections quite a few of the grassroot political candidates in the US have chosen to use Drupal and CiviCRM. I suspect for the 2012 election, this combination will be the platform of choice for the main campaign sites also :)

Note that these campaign sites are not the official campaign sites. They are created and built by their supporters. Some of the campaigns using Drupal / CiviCRM are:

In the past few weeks we've seen the introduction of a couple of CiviCRM Application Service Providers (ASP's). This is indeed good news for the CiviCRM community and gives the smaller organization a more cost effective and simpler solution to manage and host their web site and data.

The first one out of the blocks was CivicSpace On Demand. CSOD offers Drupal 4.7, CiviCRM 1.5 along with a few other useful drupal modules including CCK and Views. The CiviCRM install comes with CiviMail, CiviContribute and CiviMember.

Peter Hirst a long time CiviCRM and CiviMail user and contributor announced OpenSocialSites.com a few weeks ago. OpenSocialSites.com is based on Drupal 5.1, CiviCRM 1.6 and can additional drupal modules can be installed per your needs. It also comes with the other CiviCRM components including CiviMail, CiviContribute and CiviMember. Peter is also offering Joomla + CiviCRM hosting which will serve our ever growing Joomla community needs quite nicely

As some of you are aware, I'm currently living in Nelson, NZ. We've been moving quite often in our quest to find a long term furnished rental (which was surprisingly difficult and cumbersome in a small town). We did manage to find a pretty good place in Tahunanui, Nelson and moved in this weekend. Unfortunately our good friends at Telecom NZ, worthy recipients indeed of the Supreme Ass awards, could not switch on broadband at the new place till later this week.

The team is continuing to chip away at the big list of issues posted for 1.7 while we do our best at keeping some other balls in the air.

Activity on the mailing lists has picked up quite a bit over the past few weeks - with posts ranging from installation problems to "how do I..." to feedback on improvements and additions. Fortunately, Peter Hirst of Open Social Sites has done an incredible job chipping in and answering quite a few of the support questions. This has really helped the team stay focused on development efforts - major kudos to Peter!

We are also working hard on two consulting engagements - one for QuestBridge's 2007 Colllege Prep Scholarship program, and another for Selection Phase of The McConnell Foundation's Scholarship programs (in conjunction with CivicActions). Both of these projects give us the opportunity to improve the extensibility of CiviCRM for specific vertical markets/applications.

CiviCRM is localised into several languages and used by people all around the world. All of the CiviCRM translations are provided by volunteers; this blog post explains how to participate in the community of translators and make CiviCRM usable for people who prefer to use software in their language.

General Informations

I originally wrote this in an email to the civicrm-dev list, but figured putting it on the blog for the record would be a good idea.

Community support and input is super important to us in all respects. It lets everyone know how folks are using the product for their organization / business / group. A lot of the features and direction that CiviCRM has gone in has been heavily influenced by the needs and comments of the community on the mailing list and forum.

Please continue sending us your thoughts / reviews and critique. Please take the time to make CiviCRM a better product by: