Joomla

When preparing an email newsletter, one part of it that is time consuming is gathering together all the content that is needed. In my experience, virtually all the content already exists elsewhere, such as in the local CMS, in CiviCRM, or on a blog, or some other online source.    So I was thinking how can I make this process easier.  What I did: I created mail merge tokens for CiviCRM that autofill a list of recent blog posts, stories, or any other type or category of CMS content.

When preparing an email newsletter, one part of it that is time consuming is gathering together all the content that is needed. In my experience, virtually all the content already exists elsewhere, such as in the local CMS, in CiviCRM, or on a blog, or some other online source.    So I was thinking how can I make this process easier.  What I did: I created mail merge tokens for CiviCRM that autofill a list of recent blog posts, stories, or any other type of CMS content.

When I started using CiviCRM almost 5 years ago, I was amazed at how many things it could bring to a website right out of the box. The more I used it, the more I wanted to, and saw potential beyond simply keeping contact information, collecting donations, or managing events. CiviCRM is a game-changer. It was shortly after getting into a couple of large projects that the shine started to wear off just a little. Things started getting complicated and working with a CMS whose name is a Swahili word meaning, "all together" or "as a whole.", this was anything but.

I just returned from my first CiviCRM sprint. It was called the DC Sprint, but as Jeremy has already posted, we were actually in Maryland.

As a first time attendee of a CiviCRM conference and sprint, I really did not know what to expect. I was very pleased that both WordPress and Joomla! received some real attention at the sprint and I hope we are heading to a place where CiviCRM can be truly CMS agnostic.

We're approaching the middle of the third day of the 2014 East Coast code sprint, situated in a bucolic farmhouse just outside of Frederick, Maryland. The location has made this sprint a little different, with some people being able to commute back and forth. In total, 14 or so sprinters have been working on webtests, improvements to CiviVolunteer, and improvements to buildkit for all platforms, which some renewed focus on Joomla and Wordpress.

A number of forum posts popped up over the last week+ with issues running the system cron job. The cron would report the user/password is incorrect and unable to authenticate, even though the credentials were correct. The issues started to arise around the time v4.4.4 was released so most people thought it was due to changes in that release.

If you are a Joomla+CiviCRM user or implementer in the New York City region, you may be interested in some upcoming sessions at JoomlaDay NYC, September 22-23. Details are here: http://www.joomladaynyc.com/

On Saturday I'll be leading an Intro to CiviCRM session that will provide an overview of CiviCRM functionality and touch on some key administrator/implementer considerations.

On Sunday we'll do a developer session that covers implementing CiviCRM hooks through Joomla plugins, PHP/tpl override directories, and an introduction to the API.

If anyone from the CiviCRM community is considering attending and has specific things they'd like to see covered, please comment through this blog and I'll see if I can work it in.