Yes, first item of business - the official announcement of news that has been showing up here and there already. The upcoming release, that was previously referred to as 2.3 has been renamed to 3.0. :-) After long discussions we decided that the return of CiviReport, together with many other changes and improvements that have been introduced in this release deserve a major version number.
Blog posts by michal
Keep up-to-date with blogs from the core team, working groups, developers, users and champions worldwide. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive regular updates by email. We also have an RSS feed.
May 25, 2009
By michalFiled under
A few weeks ago, we started designing the new looks for contact edit screen, as a part of usability focus for CiviCRM 2.3. Quick remark on this - it's a very last minute to submit your feedback on that improvement, so if you have some good idea, come back to this blog post and submit your comments.
Anyway, now it's time to introduce some changes to contact viewing screen! Following the same process as previously with contact editing, we prepared the screen mockup for your perusal. Make sure to read the rest of this blog post, take a close look at the mockup and post your feedback/comments/critique/ideas below or on Usability forum board. Special humble request to all the CiviCRM integrators and consultants - if you have a chance to discuss over this mockup with end users that you work with, it would be most helpful if you could do so - and let us know about their reactions.
May 7, 2009
By michal Filed under CiviCRM, DocumentationThird day behind, pages count is 148 and raising. Actually, if we consider final format (size of pages) of the book, it would have 215 pages right now, but I'm using the count from temporarily generated PDF for sake of consistency with previous page count announcements from blog posts on day 1 and 2.
May 6, 2009
By michal Filed under CiviCRM, DocumentationSecond day of the sprint behind - manual pages count is now 117. We started at 9am as day before and continued writing until lunch. When we were sleeping, our off-site editor Andy came through a few chapters and introduced quite a lot of propositions, remarks and edits - so it was not only writing new text, but also integrating fixes to whatever was written so far. Second day was also the first one when off-site authors started contributing their chunks of text to the book.
May 5, 2009
By michal Filed under CiviCRM, DocumentationWow - to me personally, the first day of Book Sprint was quite a surprise. I knew there is a really cool and knowledgeable group of people here, and I also knew that getting away from everyday work really helps with focusing, but I just couldn't guess how productive this day will be.
May 4, 2009
By michal Filed under CiviCRM, DocumentationLong awaited day came - a bunch of good folks from CiviCRM Community arrived to Truckee to work on CiviCRM book! Some of us have been hanging out in San Francisco for some time already, attending NTEN and CiviCRM Developer and User Meetups, some of us arrived only today. First item of business was finalising book outline so that we can be ready to do actual writing on Monday morning.
April 15, 2009
By michal Filed under CiviCRM
A major focus for the next version of CiviCRM (v2.3) is improvement and optimisation of the user interface and its usability. During the last few weeks, together with our Advisory Group, we've been busy investigating different options for changing the way CiviCRM looks and behaves. This project will has quite a large scope, and will span over at least two versions.
For version 2.3, one goal is to unify the way different functions are being handled from a user interface perspective. We'd like clean up the HTML and CSS for as many templates as possible, and introduce stable standards for building user interface elements. From a technical point of view, one of the efforts is to make heavy use of jQuery and jQueryUI, but that seems like the easy part. Much more difficult is figuring out how to make our user interface easier to use, provide solutions that will allow people to perform everyday CiviCRM tasks quickly and effectively - and also how to make it look nice. :-) There is ongoing discussion within core team and Advisory Group on this, we are experimenting with different solutions. We will be asking you for opinions and feedback as we move forward with this part of the work for CiviCRM 2.3.
One important piece is improving the contact add/edit screen, which is one of the most crucial parts of the system. It is used quite frequently and is also quite complicated. We've built a mockup screen to share our draft "re-design".
We had a few iterations of work on this screen, and we've come to the stage where we would like you to give us feedback on whole idea. Two main goals behind the changes:
Provide a simple and quick way to input the most important information - name and contact information. This has been approached by moving email, phone and IM fields together with first name, last name etc into to first section.
Make the user interface on this screen more compact and make it easier to get to the sections you want to edit with minimal scrolling.
March 5, 2009
By michal Filed under CiviCRMTogether with releasing beta 4 of CiviCRM, we introduced first version of new documentation layout. It's been a while since our docs came through major overhaul and it was high time to start doing something about this.
December 5, 2008
By michal Filed under CiviContribute, Architecture, CiviCRMIt's that time of year again!
No, not what you think. :-) It's the time of year when new a CiviCRM version is behind the door, and it has cool new features. Code freeze is going to be introduced any day now - and we'll move on to quality assurance, alphas, betas and other equally exciting stuff.
Let me briefly introduce you to two new 2.2 features: one of them already mentioned here and there - Personal Contribution Pages (PCP), and a "last minute" addition - Soft Credits.
May 4, 2008
By michal Filed under CiviCRM, TeamsTime flies - it's been already a week since we've been together in New Zealand, enjoying face to face conversations and working together. My personal take on communication is that there is nothing like real time conversation involving two persons located in the same physical spot, so I must say I'm really enjoying this opportunity to hang out with Yashi, Dave, KJ & Lobo.
