TL;DR: A migration project is underway to bring wiki content into the Developer Guide.
The wiki is kind of like that drawer in your kitchen where you put things that seem useful but don't really have "a place". And it works okay, especially when its your kitchen, because you have a decent idea of what you've chucked in there over the years.
Hi my name is Sean and I'm an aspiring CiviCRM developer. After many years as a CiviCRM user and administrator, I've carved out some time in my life to effectively "go to school" on CiviCRM development. Last month, I got started by diving into reading the wiki, hoping it would serve as my text book. But instead I found someone else's kitchen drawer filled with – useful things, for sure – but also that familiar medley of...
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JMA Consulting is pleased to welcome Jon Goldberg as our new Director of Operations effective today.
After a brief stint as a political organizer, Jon spent 13 years working in various capacities at a non-profit legal organization, primarily in IT. In 2010 he co-founded Palante Technology Cooperative and started their CiviCRM department, where he worked for 7 years. Outside of work, Jon can be found engaging in queer community organizing, (dis-)assembling electronics, and training parrots.
"I'm really excited to have Jon join us given his keen appreciation of how to help progressive organizations achieve their missions using CiviCRM. He's got a deep and wide knowledge of CiviCRM. I appreciate how he gives back to the community like through StackExchange, where he is the top ranked CiviCRM contributor," said Joe Murray, President of JMA Consulting and co-author of...
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A few weeks ago, we rolled out an outline of how we’ll manage contributions to CiviCRM going forward. Full details about the framework are now online here. For this post, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve taken the effort forward by enabling self-reporting on contributions via a simple contribution log.
While managing community contributions is central to the Core Team’s role, it truly is a complex task to onboard, evaluate, reward and recognize contributors that come to the project for different reasons and from different sources. It’s more than a full time job. Because of this, we run the risk of diluting the efforts of our senior developers, and hence their capacity to work on CiviCRM (the software). At the end of the day, nobody wants that! So, in order to keep the Core Team...
Read moreThe CiviCRM Core Team is pleased to announce that it will begin hosting monthly webinars for project contributors and supporters (members, partners, sponsors) beginning December 8th, 2016, and continue on the second Thursday of each month throughout 2017. These webinars will be a mix of overall project updates (provided quarterly) and technical improvements and demonstrations (provided 8 months out of the year). A full schedule and details will be provided in advance at http://civicrm.org/webinars
As a project, CiviCRM continues to evolve, relying on community support and contributions more than ever. Core Team webinars are intended to provide another opportunity to connect contributors and supporters with the progress and direction of both the software and the project as a whole. While these webinars are presentations by the Core Team, Q...
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Long time contributor Eileen McNaughton recently won the New Zealand Open Source Award for Open Source Contributor, so we thought we’d reach out to a few members of the community to get input on her efforts with CiviCRM. Erik Hommel and Dave Greenberg are kicking off this blog post with their own personal thanks to Eileen. If you have a comment, story, or just want to say thanks, post it in the comments!
Thanks from Erik Hommel
I was really really happy last week to read that Eileen McNaughton won the NZ Open Source Contributor Award 2016. I can not compare to other open source projects as I only know the CiviCRM community really well, but man does she contribute! Always approachable on our communication channels, ready to help anyone in the community, fixing code, enhancing code and mothering most of the unit tests. There are times where I thought she had two lives at the same time until I read...
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Nearly 78% of sites using CiviCRM are on either version 4.6 or 4.7 (check out CiviCRM stats online). Why is that significant? Because those are the only two community supported releases currently. If you’re not on one of these versions, most importantly, don’t be alarmed. There might be a reason you’re not… perhaps you’re using a partner that continues to support an previous version, or have customizations that prohibit an upgrade. If that’s the case, feel free to skip the rest of this post. But, if there’s no good reason not to upgrade, then read on.
What do we mean when we say that 4.6 and 4.7 are the only versions being supported? Well, just that. CiviCRM 4.7 is the latest stable version of the software and is the primary focus of the Core Team. Version 4.6 is the current LTS, meaning that security updates (but not new features) will be back ported to it for a not-yet-determined amount of time. If you’re on any other version, then...
Read moreThis year, around 25 dedicated and fascinating people have gathered together in Edale, Peak District, to make improvements, discuss progress, and learn more about the CiviCRM project. Some have already left us and some will be here right up to the end of the weekend, but we have all contributed to the project in a helpful and constructive way.
We are staying in a lovely cottage in the Peak District, at the foot of the Pennine Way and half way between Sheffield and Manchester. We chose early on to split up into two groups: the Developers (‘Devs’) and the ‘Non-Devs’, each with different targets, supplemented with opportunities to come together and grapple with various issues, usually over food.
The Devs have been focussed on reviewing Pull Requests (PRs) and writing tests, which has evolved into various side projects, including writing procedures to reconcile table indexes, fixing new bugs found when testing PRs, improving reports, making Buildkit work with Bitnami...
Read moreAs the title implies, we’ve stuck our toe into improving the contributor framework before, but never quite settled on the best approach. But, it’s high time we do so. Why? Because contributors are key to sustaining and improving CiviCRM. The trouble is and has always been that recognizing, rewarding and encouraging contributions from the community is a complex task. Contributors come to the project through various channels, for various reasons, making it difficult to track and deepen engagement. Some contributors want recognition, others don’t. Some want to contribute, but don’t know how or are confused with the complexity of our community. Where do they start? Most contribute in a variety of different ways, raising the question of how best to value contributions.
Again, it’s no small task. Other open source projects, like Drupal for example, go to great lengths to accomplish this. Still others gamify engagement with elaborate badge/reward systems. In any case, moving this...
Read moreIt’s been on my tasklist to write about the CiviCRM community. Like most people it seems, my task list is longer than I care to admit, so I’ve put this off for some time. I had a moment of inspiration the other day when I was jogging about trying to visually represent some of the key elements of our community, however this was problematic for two reasons. First, our community is complex, offering different ways for people to participate around a common vision, often with little structure to support them. Second, because even though I am often struck with great ideas (at least, I think they’re great) when I’m running, I rarely remember them by the time I return home. Sadly, I don’t typically run that far.
But this one stuck with me: put together a very simple venn diagram demonstrating how the community works. Ideally this will help clarify and deepen understanding of this open source project, specifically within our end user base such that we see greater...
Read moreWe are thrilled to announce that Caitlin Cogdill, Senior Fundraising Email Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation will be our 2016 keynote speaker.
Her address will focus on Wikimedia's data-driven approach to online fundraising and how CiviCRM and other tools are used. Caitlin manages the organization's global fundraising email campaigns which spread over 30 countries in more than 20 languages and raise about 25% of Wikimedia's overall budget.
Register for the User Summit, CiviCRM's premiere conference by users and for users. Also, book your hotel reservation today. Discounts for the Hilton Garden Inn end on August 18.
