Blogs

Due to circumstances beyond their control related to their previous hosting provider, PACH was recently forced to find a new host for their Joomla website and CiviCRM. In addition, PACH has one volunteer in charge of CiviCRM which manages more than 450 volunteers and supporter contacts. They recognized the need for a solid support team in the event that this volunteer becomes unavailable or is unable to resolve an issue. They had asked several CiviCRM providers, but it was difficult to find one that could host and support Joomla, until they found Cividesk.

The team is super excited to announce that the second alpha release of CiviCRM 4.6 is now available for downloading AND you can try it out on the 4.6 sandbox site!

If you've been following the CiviCRM blog, you probably noticed the reports from Google Summer of Code 2014: Siddhant Rajagopalan built a new CiviMail composition screen, and Aditya Nambiar built an A/B testing system.

The team is super excited to announce that the first alpha release of CiviCRM 4.6 is now available for downloading AND you can try it out on the 4.6 sandbox site!

One of the 'features' of CiviCRM that has been an ongoing source of contention among our customers has been what happens when expired memberships are renewed. The current behaviour is that the existing expired membership has it's end date extended and the start date is altered to reflect the start of the latest membership period. This is great for figuring out when someone first became a member way back when. But, it makes it very hard to see breaks in their membership.

Is your New Year’s resolution to shape up your CiviCRM skills?  Learn how to better utilize CiviCRM by participating in these on-line classes taught by Cividesk.  All classes are two hours in length and designed for the new user, however many current users find the courses helpful to complete their knowledge in a particular area of the CRM. Each course focues on a different topic: Contacts, Membership, Events and Contribution management.

We have just created an extension for MAF Norge that produces an XML file for the tax authorities with the deductible amount for the year for each donor. With a little configuration customization (detailed in the documentation on GitHub) it can be used by any Norwegian organization that has to produce this file every year. MAF Norge is currently testing the extension.

If CiviCRM were a religion (interesting topic for debate, maybe?) then CiviDay would be the most important day in our calendar - our annual excuse to get together, make new friends, reconnect with old acquaintances, and generally have a good time.  Oh, and of course, to learn how CiviCRM can help you, hear about the amazing things that people are doing with CiviCRM, find out what's new in the latest release, and so on, and so on.

Beginning with CiviCRM v4.6, developing code for CiviCRM (civicrm-core.git) will require two additional tools: Composer and NodeJS. If you develop CiviCRM, then you should install them in order to continue development.