Make it happen
(Development) Towards a clean build of CiviCRM on Drupal 8
In the coming weeks, you can expect a series of changes going into the development pipeline to support the CiviCRM-Drupal 8 integration. Individually, these will seem unrelated and disjoint - they may not explicitly reference “D8”. I wanted to spend a moment to discuss the concept which ties them together: the clean install process, which will make Civi-D8 an equal member of the Civi CMS club and a good base for continued development and maintenance.
Improvements to the Export Interface are in the works
Update: the new export interface is now part of CiviCRM as of version 5.23!
CiviCRM + Drupal 8: The Official Make It Happen
The CiviCRM core team have looked at this and are now in a position to complete the work to make this an official CiviCRM release. This means they will make changes so
- CiviCRM can easily be installed with Drupal 8
- They will ensure CiviCRM works with Views in Drupal 8
A better way of creating office templates for CiviCRM
How can we find a user-friendly way of creating templates for serial letters and other mass communication? Is it possible to integrate CiviCRM with open-source online applications to facilitate the creation of office templates for our users?
This has been bothering us for some time, because many of our users find it hard to set up and work with templates in HTML format. So we started a proof of concept to check possible options… and we found an answer!
CiviTutorial - Another MIH Success!
We came down to the wire with CiviTutorial, having less than a day to go before the Make It Happen campaign funding its development was set to expire. In the end, we had 24 awesome donors pitch in to fund the extension and make CiviTutorial a reality.
Give your users customised automated tours of civicrm
The Civi Summit was a great event - full of lots of nice surprises. One that stands out for me was that what started out as some wishful thinking - namely having the ability to provide on-page tours/tutorials - ended up with us being able to beta test a 'proof of concept' before we left.
While some amongst us (ahem) were sampling the whiskey and fine IPAs late in the evening along to the strumming of the musically-able folk, others remained focussed on their laptops - and in Coleman's case this meant getting us a working prototype of a tour/tutorial system for civi pages.
Understanding CiviCRM Form Builder for the layman
The recent DevCamp in New Jersey presented several sessions on new developments in CiviCRM land as well as showcased several of its inner workings. One session presented by Core Team member Tim Otten stood out for me: Form Builder. If you’re like me, you listen to folks like Tim with a great deal of respect and appreciation for what they say (and do).
Outlook 365 CiviCRM Plugin - Looking for funding
Last month I made a proposal for a client to integrate CiviCRM with Outlook 365. This proposal was rejected because the client did not go for an e-mail migration to Outlook 365. So the need for this plugin was gone.
The plan was that this integration would do the following:
System Administrator Guide completed
Two months ago, I launched a Make It Happen campaign to build a System Administrator Guide with the goal of migrating the installation, setup, and upgrade documentation out of the wiki and into a beautiful guide on our new documentation platform. Amazingly, the MIH campaign reached its $2,000 USD minimum in only 4 days — which meant I could get to work right away!
System Administrator Guide coming soon... if MIH campaign succeeds
This Make It Happen campaign will migrate the installation, setup, and upgrade documentation out of the wiki and into a beautiful guide on our new documentation platform.
Mosaico: Drag and Drop Mailings are here!
The Mosaico CiviMail extension Phase 2 is ready for download. Read more about this drag and drop mailing editor!
Next up: APIv4
We’ve talked about and have made some progress on APIv4. Along with a native form builder and an improved UI, a new version of CiviCRM’s API was identified as a key objective our roadmap. While it may be the least glamorous of the three, it is an increasingly important and powerful feature within CiviCRM. And it’s time for an update.
CiviRules upgrading and automated testing
Some of you will know, use and might even love the CiviRules extension. We certainly do! Quite a few of the organizations we support with their CiviCRM stuff use and love it, and judging by the question on StackExchange and issues and pull requests on GitHub quite a few more do too!
Join Us for Community Fridays
Hello world, I would like to introduce the idea of of CiviCRM "Community Fridays". Let's coalesce our ongoing community efforts improving Civi around a certain day of the week: every Friday.
This is the idea of myself, Allen Shaw, Josh Gowans and and other partners. Will you consider joining us? Community Friday isn't just for bugs and developers... it's for marketing, end users and everyone.
Calling All Users of CiviGrant!
I am interested in connecting with other users of CiviGrant. The Stack Exchange is great for specific questions, but I'd also like to:
- Share real-life examples of CiviGrant use (such as customizations and online grant application processes).
- Explore groups' interest in a Make-It-Happen campaign or other cost-sharing to improve CiviGrant and other components/extensions useful to grantmaking organizations.
Email Template Builder: Mosaico Phase 2 Plans
Mosaico Phase II - CiviMail workflow integration
There has been a lot of enthusiasm about the initial release of the “Mosaico” mailing builder. For those who may have missed the news (see previous blog post here!), the Mosaico extension provides “Mailchimp like” drag and drop functionality for composing emails in CiviMail. See a quick gif below:
Volunteerism and the CiviCRM Community
Giving back to my community is a core of who I am and it gives me purpose. That is why I love being a contributor to CiviCRM. Volunteerism is how I discovered the power of CiviCRM. As a past board member of the Webster Groves School District Foundation, they reached out to me in 2009 to evaluate their need to review their engagement with eTapestry. I decided to do my research to look for alternative solutions available to understand our options.
CiviCRM Entity -- Upcoming and Future Development
CiviCRM Entity is a Drupal module which greatly enhances CiviCRM integration with Drupal. This module exposes many CiviCRM entities as true Drupal entities. That means that almost any module can use Drupal entities. As a result, these modules can access and manipulate CiviCRM data directly from within Drupal via Drupal’s Entity API.
Make your life easier with handy presets for your contacts (...and help make this useful extension available for everybody)
If you have been working with CiviCRM for a while, you will have noticed that certain patterns occur regularly in your data - and thus have to be entered over and over again.
Consider this:
-
The prefix "Mr" corresponds to the gender "male", "Mrs" is usually "female" - you know that, but CiviCRM does not, so you have to make an additional entry
-
In languages other than English, you might have the additional hassle of choosing the gender-specific greetings
CiviVolunteer 2.0 Matching Grant Successful
We want to thank everyone in the open source and CiviCRM communities for their support for the CiviVolunteer 2.0 matching grant fundraising campaign. We were given the challenge of raising $15,000 by March 31st in order to access a matching grant for the same amount, and we raised $16,480!
Change request for CiviCRM core (withdrawn)
We implemented CiviCRM in our non-profit company CEPS (www.ceps.eu) for it fits very well our needs. We use it almost out of the box for contact management, memberships, mailing and event registration.
On problem we experienced immediately - people where able to change their data during the event registration process and we didn't like this. We keep our data up to date manualy and wanted that only event registration is registered, but didn't want the current user info to be updated with the form input.
Join by March 31st: CiviVolunteer 2.0 Matching Grant
As we get close to March 31st, we are excited to share that we have raised $9,250 of the $15,000 to get a matching grant to create CiviVolunteer 2.0. Please consider donating what you can to show your support. With this matching grant, we will be able to able volunteer management within CiviCRM more robust and powerful. Here's what some of the contributors are saying about the importance of CiviVolunteer 2.0 to their organizations. Donate now.
Drip Campaigns / Drip Marketing / Welcome Series
First blog post here. I am hoping to at least shed some light on an issue I had when setting up CivicCRM. Its not a comprehensive solution to the problem; I hope to follow up soon with full source code.
Drip campaigns are a series of contacts triggered by certain event. There are many reasons to this. It is an effective way to keep in contact with a supporter over a period of time.
CiviRules - basic engine as the result of our first sprint
During January and February MAF Norge and Jaap and me from CiviCooP have done the first CiviRules sprint, funded by MAF Norge. Our ambitions where:
Looking forward to 4.6!
I’ve been spending a lot of time the past few weeks working with alpha versions of our upcoming 4.6 release, and I’m excited to share some of the cool new features and improvements. This release includes contributions of vision and code from a wide variety of end-users and implementers. The fact that our entire community reaps the benefits reminds me once again of the awesome power of open source collaboration.
UK Postcode Lookups.....
In the UK we’re used to being able to lookup our addresses based on our postcodes and charities add this to their wish lists for their own sites. However, once they establish the costs associated with this, they often find the ROI isn’t in the black and drop the idea.
There’s some good news………
CiviRules sprint in January and March 2015
In 2014 MAF Norge funded CiviCooP developing the TriggerAction extension (https://github.com/CiviCooP/org.civicoop.triggers) to assist them with automated Donor Journeys in CiviCRM. Our team of Jaap & Erik from CiviCooP and Steinar & Helen from MAF Norge worked hard for a week and we came up with something that does work but is fairly complicated and decidedly unsexy.
Who's interested in a customizable Sort Name?
"Sort Name" is used by CiviCRM for tabular search results. CiviCRM has historically just copied the Household and Organization names directly into the Sort Name field. For names such the "The Can Company" and "Tom and Jeri Cooper" this doesn't work out so well; the sort will happen on the letter T as in "The" rather than the letter C as is more appropriate.
Improved permissions for activities and cases
A little background.
Established in 1972, we are a non-profit human services organization that serves many diverse populations in the Greater Pittsburgh area.
A large part of our focus is on homeless services, but we also do some mental and physical health programming, early childhood development, community integration and host a large food pantry near the University of Pittsburgh campus.