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.
Two aspects of CiviCRM’s broad roadmap involve improving the user interface and adopting a flexible form builder, both of which are well underway. In some cases, there’s overlap in the end product in that work on one or the other results in an overall better user experience. That’s the case with work that’s currently underway that addresses CiviCRM’s export interface.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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:
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!
