CiviReport

Hi,

So as every consultant, there is a bit of new projects, maintenance, stuff you do for free for the community, new ideas, meetings, pre-sales, funky developments & the dreaded admin part (invoicing/timesheet).

A couple of weeks back I wrote here some thoughts about letting users manage and modify their own private collection of reports without actually having site-wide "administer reports" privileges. I've since gone ahead and written up the code to make this happen, and I would love to get feedback from the community on its usefulness and ways to improve it.

I recently completed a conversion of about 8 years of history from a 5 year old Blackbaud Kintera site to a Drupal CiviCRM solution. Confused yet? Don't worry, all we be revealed in time. As a way of giving back, I am planning to share my experiences good and bad, what worked, what did not, what I learned and what I will and won't do next time.

Note: You can see videos of these features in action on NS Web Solutions' case study page for this project.

Update: Some of the code for these features is available on GitHub. See my comment below.

CiviCRM offers an incredible set of features straight out of the box. At NS Web Solutions we're sometimes asked to provide a CRM system with some pretty unique features, and we've found that by relying on CiviCRM's wide array of hooks and customization features, there's a lot that can be done.

Eli Beckerman is the second winner of a copy of Using CiviCRM from Packt Publishing. Eli is excited about the potential of CiviCRM to organize bottom-up transformations to deal collaboratively with the many crises facing the world today.

This has come up a couple of times before. According to my chat with Lobo today, not much is happening on this front. Since our client at Two Mice and a Strawberry has a need for this, we're diving in head first this week. Hopefully we'll have something that's worth contributing to core. Please comment below if you have any thoughts on the ideas presented here.

This release includes several COOL new features:

• Personal Dashboards - ** NEW in this beta release ** Each CiviCRM user can now configure their own dashboard (CiviCRM Home) to include summary data that's important to their work. Any available 'CiviReports' can be embedded in the dashboard in tabular or graphical format. Check out some examples on Kurund's recent blog post.
• Contact Subtypes - Extend (and / or rename) the built-in contact types and create custom fields specific to a subtype (e.g. Staff vs. Volunteer custom fields). Thanks to the folks at Alpha International for sponsoring this much-requested feature (learn more...).
• HTML Emails for Receipts, Event Confirmations and more - Templates for all system-generated emails are now stored in the database and editable by administrators. You can easily add styles, logos and more to your emails.
• HTML layout overhaul for online contribution pages - Phase 1 in efforts to make front-end CiviCRM pages much easier to style / modify via CSS (learn more...). Thanks to Kyle Jaster and the folks at rayogram.com..
• Usability improvements - Streamlined DATE input and list sorting widgets. Prevent users from losing work by alerting them if they try to navigate away from a form with unsaved changes.
• Support for Price Sets in Online Contribution Pages - Provides the flexibility to incorporate more complex contribution options (e.g. "Contribute $25 more to receive our monthly magazine.").
• Custom Data Groups Extensibility - Custom data groups can now be shared between multiple types of Activities, Events, Participant Roles etc.
• Access Control for Reports - Access control list (ACL) based permissioning is now applied to report data.

Introduction: The Need

Progressive Technology Project (PTP) supports grassroots community organizing groups nationwide that engage in social, economic and environmental justice efforts to empower low-income people and communities of color. These groups conduct phone banking and field canvassing as an integral part of their base-building and voter engagement strategies to engage existing and new constituents. PTP hired DharmaTech to help them build PowerBase: a customized CiviCRM for use by community organizing groups.

PowerBase helps groups manage the following data related to phonebanking and field canvassing work:

• voter info, history, and demographics
• reason why the phonebank or canvass is taking place
• responses to questions asked during the phonebank or canvass
• phonebank or canvass status
• primary language spoken

The Physician Health Program of BC has a task that goes something like this: Their vendors, and even staff and board members, are not paid directly by them but by the provincial medical association (BCMA), so when invoices from vendors come in, they need to enter the information onto a special form and send that off to the BCMA for payment. Then they periodically send back a statement to reconcile against. Since all the vendors are contacts in CiviCRM already, it made sense to think about putting this in there too.

We are finding that CiviCRM/accounts issues are becoming increasingly important for our clients, and Eileen's recent blogs and the discussion they are generating are a fantastic step towards helping find the best way for Civi to deal with financial transactions.

For example, I think it could be useful for Civi to ultimately develop functionality for maintaining simple bank accounts within CiviCRM, so that small organisations can maintain basic accounts without the headaches of integration with an external package.

The team has released version 2.2.7 today. This release includes an important security update - and we recommend that you upgrade sites to this release as soon as possible. 2.2.7 also includes phase 1 of CiviReport - with 14 built-in report templates with coverage of contact data, contributions, events and memberships. Stay tuned for a separate blog post with lots more details on the new reporting features.

• Traditional reporting solutions: BIRT, Jasper Reports and/or Crystal Reports. We demoed an integration with BIRT a few releases back, but this did not get any traction. There are a couple of larger deployments that have built custom reports using BIRT and Jasper.
• Views2 and CiviCRM integration. However the lack of grouping / sub-total functionality has prevented this from being a complete reporting solution. This is also a drupal only solution
• Custom Drupal modules / Joomla components. Quite a few folks have gone down this path, but there has not been a lot of sharing of these reports within the community