Rules integration, Multiple contact subtypes, Upsell / change membership type, Permissioning integration with Joomla 1.6 ACL, Personal Campaign Pages - offline contributions, Integrate CiviCampaign with CiviEngage, contributions, events and mailings, and a few holdovers from 3.3.

 

In some ways choosing Open Source software is like making a bet on humanity. We choose to believe that without contract or obligation individuals, organisations and businesses will work together to produce something that benefits all of us. With CiviCRM it feels like we've upped the odds to double or nothing because the organisations that use CiviCRM represent some of our noblest causes (and some that we may not agree with) but parting with funds from cash-strapped or deserving organisations to fund shared development is a lot harder than spending money out of a business account.

 

In my mind contributing back to Open Source projects that we benefit from and CiviCRM in particular is both a moral and a practical obligation. If we want it to be there for us we have to be there for it. For those of us who may have limited funds Make-it-Happen is a great way to make our bet on a scale that is appropriate to us or our organisation.

 

Going into 2011 community funding via Make-it-Happen and direct sponsorship is going to be the key driver behind the remaining 3.x releases. Release 3.4 and 4.0 are both expected early in the new year with 3.4 being the last release that will support drupal 6 and 4.0 supporting drupal 7. Obviously supporting two versions of drupal will put pressure on the CiviCRM core team and the duration of that double support will depend on the community.

 

However, right now it's the time for us to think about what initiatives we want to support into release 3.4. There are some ongoing and some new intiatives up for sponsorship.

 

Rules integration

Drupal Rules module is all about managing workflows. If you want to have a manager approve CiviMails before they go out or events before they are posted these are 'workflows' in geek-speak. A work flow might be a series of steps like someone creates an event, someone else approves it but it only becomes live after the speakers bio is pasted as a node (drupal events and CiviCRM events can be combined). If you can start to see the possibilities then here's the widget.

 

 

 

 

Multiple contact subtypes

So, you record one set of information for the kids at your school and a different set for the parents but suddenly (hopefully due to the longevity of your data tracking) one of the kids becomes a parent - how do you deal with that in CiviCRM? If your contacts refuse to live in one box for the duration of your interaction with them this may be the enhancement you are looking for (especially if you like pina coladas and singing in the rain - oh dear API team tendency for bad jokes coming through).

 

 

 

 

Integrate Campaigns with contributions, events and mailings

This initiative will integrate CiviCampaign with the rest of CiviCRM, and integrate CiviEngage features w/CiviCampaign. The features currently being considered as part of this project include:

• 1. Add core properties to campaign (goals etc), and allow custom fields to extend campaign data.
2. Add Campaigns as a property of contributions, events, activities, and mailings (click thru's). 3. Campaign filters on advanced search and component searches (i.e. Find Contributions). 4. Reporting: 1-2 new Campaign report(s), and printable "Record Survey Responses" pages with selectable display columns for walklists / canvassing / phone-banking.

 

 

 

 

Membership Management - changing membership type

We have seed sponsorship to facilitate the 'upselling of membership' at renewal time and the ability to allow people to change membership types without losing continuity of the membership record. But, we need a bit more to Make-it-Happen

 

 

 

 

CiviCRM Permissioning Integration with Joomla 1.6 ACL

Want to have hide your major donor information from your volunteers? Want to create a member directory for only you current paid members? Want to give edit access to only a certain set of contacts to a specific staff person? If you answered yes to any of the above questions or you have permissioning needs for your Joomla + CiviCRM install, then you need to help Make-it-Happen

 

 

 

 

Personal Campaign Pages - Credit offline contributions

Currently if you receive a contribution that should be credited to a constituent's Personal Campaign pages (PCP), there's no way to record that link. This initiative would add the ability to specify that a contribution received offline should be credited to a particular PCP - including adding the donor to that PCP's Honor Roll.

 

 

 

 

We also have a few initiatives quietly ticking along until we can make them happen.

Smart Groups on Contact Tabs

 

This initiative will result in the contact tab displaying the smart groups a contact belongs to as well as their 'hard' groups on their contact tab. Some optimisation of smart groups will be carried out in order to implement this.

 

 

 

Organization Address Inheritance Improvements

 

This will automatically link a contact's work address with their employer's address off the contact summary (and potentially extendable to the on-behalf-of form).

 

 

 

Organisation - on behalf of - use a profile

 

Allow the use of a profile to control what information is collected about an organisation on contribution and memberships signup forms. Currently this form is hard-coded and doesn't support custom fields.

 

 

 

So, we've saved the world one CiviCRM implementation at a time. Now, about climate change...

 

Successful Sponsored Projects

These projects have met their fund-raising goals and are being implemented for an upcoming release. Thanks!

 

 

Multisite CiviMail fixes

At the moment some improvements need to be made to the way in which Civimail handles multisites relating to sending to all recipients of child groups, respecting the source domain and respecting the senders permissions. We have an initiative to raise funds to fix these issues and also (hopefully) to make a start on setting up a multisite test suite.

 

 

 

 

De-duping -our ongoing effort to make it easier

This one I launched recently and the fact it wasn't greeted with a flood of tiny donations says to me the people who don't do de-duping aren't reading my blog! The navigation of the deduping process is hard work and I personally would love to see this one happen

 

 

 

 

Comments

Thanks Eileen -- I appreciate your efforts to push forward on de-duping improvements. Here is a suggestion on that front. A major hurdle for my organization is the number of different names that people use to identify themselves. People will insist on calling themselves Robert in one context and Bob in another, and expect us to figure it out. The different names result in duplicates that are difficult to find even with the current scoring system.
Now that search has been modified so that you can match either a first name or a nickname, can we extend that concept to deduping? That would mean that the merge screen would allow you to merge the first name field in one contact into the nickname field of the other, or vice versa. It could be handled like multiple phone numbers are handled now, with a select box for the destination of the merged name. Also in setting up the dedupe rules, we should be able to check a box that says, "Allow first name match to nickname" or something similar. Ideally we would be able to store several nicknames instead of just one, but even one would be a help.
Again, thank you.