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. So the end-user sees a list of tokens, one for each content type, each term/category, each aggregator feed, and for each date range. Such as "Content of type 'blog' created in the last 7 days" . What is particulary powerful about this approach, is that if you are also using a CMS aggregator (such as the aggregator module in Drupal core) then virually any external RSS feed is turned into CMS content, which is now available as a CiviCRM token. (The original blog post about this extension is at:...
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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. So the end-user sees a list of tokens, one for each content type, each term/category, each aggregator feed, and for each date range. Such as "Content of type 'blog' created in the last 7 days" . What is particulary powerful about this approach, is that if you are also using a CMS aggregator (such as the aggregator module in Drupal core) then virually any external RSS feed is turned into CMS content, which is now available as a CiviCRM token.
Some examples of how this new extension may help your...
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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. CiviCRM and Joomla have a complicated relationship, because it’s really different from Drupal and equally different from Wordpress. This has always been a point of difficulty for Joomla users in the Civi community.
The story could end here, with me throwing up my hands and doing my own thing or going a completely different way, but it doesn’t. Having experience with IRC, I decided to dive head...
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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.
WordPress CiviCRM installs can now benefit from WP-CLI tools. WP-CLI is a Drush equivilant for WordPress. We were able to merge Andy Walker's port into 4.5 and Tim Otten added full API Explorer support for this. At the developer training day in DC on Saturday, we noticed an issue with civix and WordPress. This also fixed and now civix works with all CMSs without having to be directly tied to one as in the past. These two enhancements will help WordPress developers immensely.
Dana Skallman and I also worked through the unresolved tickets for WordPress. A...
Read moreWe'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. It's looking promising that buildkit will be fully supporting all the CMS platforms by the end of the sprint, making it even easier to contribute.
As this was my first sprint, I wasn't completely sure what to expect. In between some intense, heads-down work, we've found time for decompression as well. We've worked in great meals on the various porches at the farmhouse, great conversation around the firepit, and a spirited round of "The Greatest Game Ever." Monday also included a spirited discussion on forms strategy for Civi 5.0...
Read moreA 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.
The issue is actually caused by changes to the password hashing mechanism, and consequently the authentication method, in Joomla, starting in vJ3.2.1 and J2.5.18. Those versions require changes to how extensions like CiviCRM verify authentication credentials.
The fix for those versions will be included in CiviCRM v4.4.5 (http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-14208). In the meantime, you can apply the following patch to fix your existing installation: https://github....
Read moreFor the past several months, my team at the Alliance for Catholic Education at the University of Notre Dame have been working on developing a mobile client for CiviCRM. It is now hosted on GitHub HERE.
So what exactly does it do, and what is its purpose? We know that with the increasingly mobile world, client relations need to be accessible on-the-go. This is the main motivation behind the work we've done with our CiviCRM Mobile Client (not to be confused with CiviMobile). We have a demo running HERE. Right now the client has functionality for viewing, searching, editing, and adding contacts with basic fields, notes and relationships (we have organizations, activities and tasks, also in the works but they’re a little buggy right now). We use the Client exclusively with Joomla right now and are very pleased with how it is developing.
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The second alpha release of CiviCRM 4.4 is now available for downloading AND you can try it out on the 4.4 sandbox site!
We Need You to Try it Out!
Excited to try the new features in this release? Please do! Great software requires great testers, and you can help. You don't need to be super technical to participate in this way, but your participation will make a huge difference.
- Download it and either do a fresh install or (better yet) upgrade a test copy of your existing database. Note that this is alpha software and should not be used on production servers.
- Try to break it! Do all the things you normally do with CiviCRM, try out as much as you can think of.
- If anything doesn't seem right, please let us know on the ...
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.
At CiviCon, Gunner from Aspiration Tech facilitated a session with the entire community soliciting feedback, discussion and comments on the project. It was a good opportunity for everyone to give feedback on the state of the project, things that we are doing a good job with, and things that we can improve. We ended up doing a collaborative grouping of the feedback in various categories and sorting the comments.
Some of the positives that are worth highlighting include:
- Folks loved the responsiveness, culture and support on forums and IRC.
- The Make It Happen feature is a big hit. The ability to read detailed descriptions on a blog post and comment on that is appreciated.
- Progressive Tech Project, PalanteTech and core team got quite a few appreciations.
- Lots of mention of the open welcoming nature and passion of the community.
- Raising and talking about the gender issue was appreciated.
- Lots of...
