josh's blog

In conjunction with the civicrm.org website transition, we’ve undertaken a revision of the CiviCRM brand and messaging, as well as an overhaul of the site’s content. Likely the lowest hanging fruit is the CiviCRM logo, so that effort has shown the most progress to date. This post, in fact, is a summary of the effort and its result, as well as a request for feedback.

Olá desde Lisboa! Sou o Josh e sou um membro da equipa principal do CiviCRM. Estou neste momento sediado em Lisboa e, após conversar com algumas organizações sem fins lucrativos, comecei a pensar organizar um encontro mensal em Portugal para dar a conhecer o CiviCRM e também para dar formação e apoio. Usas CiviCRM ou estás interessado em aprender? Vives em Lisboa?

In early July we announced that the contributor log as we know it would come to an end, replaced by time tracking in Gitlab (the official cutover day is August 15, by the way). And, shortly thereafter, we began a discussion within the Core Team about how we manage, track and value contributions to the project. We’ve also been discussing with various stakeholders how CiviCRM is funded, and invariably we end up reviewing both financial support and in-kind contributions.

Two aspects of CiviCRM’s broad roadmap involve improving the user interface and adopting a flexible form builder, both of which are well underway. In some cases, there’s overlap in the end product in that work on one or the other results in an overall better user experience. That’s the case with work that’s currently underway that addresses CiviCRM’s export interface.

A few years ago we undertook an effort to capture “contributions” to CiviCRM via a contributor log. As you can imagine, this was and is an imperfect attempt to capture information on who is doing what and when. It’s a difficult task given that community members support CiviCRM in many different ways and through many different channels, including Gitlab, MatterMost, and Stack Exchange to name a few. 

If you’re not already aware, CiviCRM version 5.13 shipped this past Wednesday. In addition to this being the normal monthly release of the latest stable version of CiviCRM, it will also serve as the next version of CiviCRM ESR, officially in August. Finally, CiviCRM version 5.13 will be the last version of CiviCRM to support PHP 5.6.

There’s a lot here to digest, so let’s break it down with a few questions.

It’s been a long time coming, but we finally managed to post the Core Team’s financials online in a format that not only shows where we’re at but also breaks down our income and expenses over the past 12 months. We’ve maintained project stats online for some time at https://stats.civicrm.org so it made sense to just add a new tab there. Check it out here. The financials are currently updated each month, and we’ll continue to expand on them as we have capacity.

We came down to the wire with CiviTutorial, having less than a day to go before the Make It Happen campaign funding its development was set to expire. In the end, we had 24 awesome donors pitch in to fund the extension and make CiviTutorial a reality.

The first Wednesday of the month is an important day for the CiviCRM community. It’s the day where a new, scheduled monthly release drops. These normally include bug fixes, minor features changes and improvements. Nothing earth shattering (hopefully). Upgrades are typically routine and easy. For many, this is a fairly painless process to manage, especially as the ease of upgrade and release reliability have improved over the years.