Blogs

Thanks to a successful Make-it-Happen campaign the 4.1 release comes with a much improved and super flexible approach for running Civi's critical back-ground processing tasks. These tasks include keeping membership statuses up to date and sending renewal reminders, sending scheduled CiviMail mailings, sending pledge payment reminders, and more. I've spent the past 10 days testing and documenting the new "consolidated cron" functionality, and the good news is that I think it fulfills the promise of providing a convenient and friendly way to administer and run all the required tasks for a site.

The "bad" news is that these improvements are NOT backward compatible. The set of PHP scripts which were previously used to run these tasks have all been deprecated (and moved to a 'deprecated' directory). This means that all CiviCRM-related cron jobs will stop working as soon as any site is upgraded to 4.1. (Yes, a loud warning will appear on the screen at the end of the upgrade process.)

Notice to non-developers: This post is about how some functionality in 4.2 will be implemented in code and in the database, with very minor changes to anything visible through a browser. If you're not a developer, it probably won't interest you.

The first North of England meetup took place on the 12th of January 2012. It was really well attended with fifteen attendees. The attendess consisted of people interested in CiviCRM, users, implementers and developers. Some of these people had travelled quite a long way to get there and we were really pleased to see them.

For anyone who is using pricesets and/or automated recurring contributions with a payment processor, you will probably enjoy the 3 custom searches that you can download here

One of my favorite features in CiviCRM 4.1 is the improved support for custom tokens via hooks. It's really opened up the possibilities for building some great functionality and new workflows in CiviCRM. If you already know what tokens and hooks are, skip down to see some cool examples.

CiviCRM had a very successful year in 2011. The project grew significantly in different areas and we made progress on a few long standing issues. The biggest change in our opinion is the increase in community involvement across all aspects of the project.

During the december 2011 sprint in The Netherlands we discussed a different approach to the developer training sessions. We wanted to bring the approach in line with the user and administrator training sessions developed during the sprint following CiviCon London 2011. In short this means we do not try to focus on dealing with all aspects of CiviCRM but focus more on the needs of the participants. The aim is not to learn all there is to learn but to learn enough to get started.

There are various CiviCRM events coming up in London this February, indeed there is 'something for everyone' regardless of your level of experience and familiarity with CiviCRM.  If you can't make it over to the US this April, you should definitley consider participating in one or more of these events...

A couple of weeks back I wrote here some thoughts about letting users manage and modify their own private collection of reports without actually having site-wide "administer reports" privileges. I've since gone ahead and written up the code to make this happen, and I would love to get feedback from the community on its usefulness and ways to improve it.

The team is excited to announce the second beta release for 4.1 with support for Drupal 7, Drupal 6, Joomla 1.7/1.6, and the integration with Wordpress 3.3 (wohoooo!!!).