Earlier today we had a conference call with a few consulting firms and individuals who integrate and deploy CiviCRM for clients. There were approximately 15 folks in the room. The agenda and quite a few comments are documented on this wiki page.
Blog posts by lobo
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January 27, 2009
By lobo Filed under CiviCRMSome links to recent blog posts about CiviCRM. We've also started tweeting about CiviCRM. You can follow us here
January 23, 2009
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM, Drupal, JoomlaI spent some time analyzing data that we've been collecting over the past few months. In v2.1 we added a ping back feature which lets us know what component folks are using and the size of some of the tables (which gives us an estimate of the size of the site etc). All information is hashed and we do not record any IP addresses. Details of what we collect are in a prior blog post
January 15, 2009
By lobo Filed under DrupalSome personal info to set the background: I have two kids who started kindergarden and pre-k earlier this year. We've also been involved with the KidZone Museum (in truckee, ca). Small schools and museums have a large part of their annual budget come in via live auctions. I did a bit of digging around and could not find any open source software that addresses this sort of fund raiser auctions.
January 3, 2009
By loboFiled under The team has been focused on doing a pretty extensive QA cycle for the CiviCRM 2.2 release. We have approx 10 issues to resolve and another 10 issues to verify. 2.2 seems to be looking quite good so far :). The list of features, improvements and schedule is on the 2.2 wiki page
November 23, 2008
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM, Drupal, Joomla
CiviMail is getting another major upgrade in 2.2. Some of the features coming in 2.2 include:
PHP return channel solution. This feature should enable more folks to install and run CiviMail. This will obsolete our amavisd return channel solution. No perl or sys admin / root access expertise needed any more :)
Adding CiviMail as an "action" to search results. This feature will allow folks to send a mailing to a "dynamic smart group" and alleviate the need to create multiple groups just for civimail purposes. Thus if you want to send a targeted mailing to all the folks in the 94135 zip code in your "we want more green trees" group, you enter the relevant search parameters (check the group and type the zip code), do the search and invoke the "Send Bulk Email" action. You can read more about this issue here
Adding token hooks and ability to send "templatized" emails. This is described in more detail below
November 20, 2008
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM, Drupal, JoomlaCiviCRM 2.1.2 release with bug fixes, as well as a fix for a critical security vulnerability is now available for download. CiviCRM 2.0.7 a maintainance release fixing critical security vulnerabilities is also available for download. The vulnerability addressed could allow a remote user with insufficient permissions to access CiviCRM functionality via the API and / or command line scripts.
November 13, 2008
By lobo Filed under CiviCRM
Our global meeting resulted in some new features being added to 2.2. Our team worked on a new jQuery based country/state selector and incorporating hook(s) to the "amount" functionality of online contribution and event registration pages. I'll give a brief description of the feature set and functionality of these projects
New jQuery based State Country widget
Our previous widget was a dojo based combo box widget. Both the country and the state were ajax based combo boxes. The state combo box was dependent on the value chosen in the country combo box. This implementation was quite complex and not easily replicated (hence u did not see the widget in many places). For 2.2 we took a slightly different approach: The country field is a simple html select box (the values are restricted by the countries configured in the admin area). The state selector is now dynamic and refreshed with new values whenever the country is changed. We took inspiration and borrowed a fair part of the code from: Simple chained combobox plugin for jQuery.
November 2, 2008
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRMThe CiviCRM core team is currently meeting in San Francisco. We tend to meet 2-3 times a year. These meetings help us crank out a few large projects as a group and also help improve our communication when we return to our respective home bases.
October 27, 2008
By lobo Filed under Architecture, CiviCRMImplementing support for multiple organizations with hierarchy is one of the main themes of the phase 2 part of the CiviCRM / The Public Interest Network (PIN) project. PIN has a fairly complex structure. It is a federation of organizations which include US PIRG, Environment America and others.
